
Ltit-rfSaiiS 



:^- i/ll¥l 






k* 



FOUR FRENCHWOMEN 



■;^%'~-6^: 




Mademoiselle de Corday, 
after Siccardi. 



Four Frenchwomen 



MADEMOISELLE DE CORD AY 
MADAME ROLAND 

THE PRINCESSE DE LAMBALLE 
MADAME DE GENLIS 



BY 

AUSTIN DOBSON 
It 



3Illu0trateti 



NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD, AND COMPANY 

Publishers 



M'W 



DC /^5 

1^^ 1 



University Press: 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge^ 



48 65 55 

JUL 1 7 1942 



To MY Friend 
BRANDER MATTHEWS 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



A MONG reasons for reprinting these papers, two 
-**• chiefly may be mentioned, — one, that they were 
originally planned for publication in book-form ; the 
other, that by re-issuing them now^ the author has 
been enabled to give them the revision of which, 
from lapse of time, they stood in need. 

It may be objected that the Princess de Lamballe 
was, by birth, an Italian. But by her marriage, by 
the more important part of her life, and above all 
by her tragic death, she belongs to the country of 
her adoption. 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Mademoiselle de Corday i 

Madame Roland 3' 

The Princess de Lamballe 63 

Madame de Genlis 107 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



Mademoiselle de Corday, after pagb 

Siccardi Frontispiece 

Marat 2 

Assassination of Marat . 6 

Mademoiselle de Corday, after Hauer . . 18 

Madame Roland 30 

BuzoT 34 

Monsieur Roland 48 

Madame Roland on the Scaffold ... 58 

The Princess de Lamballe 62 

Marie Antoinette and her Children . . 90 

The Prison La Force 98 

Madame de Genlis (Young) 106 

Rousseau 154 

Madame de Genlis (Old) 190 



MADEMOISELLE DE CORDAY. 
1768-1793. 



" Comprendre, c*est pardonner^ 

Madame de Stael. 

Ah ! judge her gently, who so grandly erred, 

So singly smote, and so serenely fell ; 
Where the wild Anarch's hurrying drums are heard, 

The frenzy fires the finer souls as well. 



FOUR FRENCHWOMEN. 



I. 

"pARIS streets have had their changes. If, 
-■- now-a-days, you want the Rue des Cor- 
deliers, you must ask for the Rue de TEcole 
de Medecine, and even between these two the 
place has been three times christened. In the 
room of the old Grey Friars church has sprung 
up a spacious college ; where once, in the silent 
convent-garden, the flat-foot fathers shuffled to 
and fro, crowds of students now swarm daily 
to the dissecting-rooms. Peaceful professors 
dilate leisurely on the circulation of the blood 
where once, in the hall of the erst-famous club, 
Danton flashed suddenly into a furious elo- 
quence, or Marat cried for " heads." The serge 
and three-knot girdle have yielded to the scalpel 
and the saw. 

Nearly a century ago, there lived in the Rue 
des Cordeliers one who had made himself a 



2 Four Frenchwomen, 

power in France. Long before the tocsin first 
sounded in 1788, this man — half dwarf, half 
maniac, foiled plagiarist and savant manqud, 
prurient romancer, rancorous libeller, envious, 
revengeful, and despised — had heaped up infi- 
nite hatred of all things better than himself. 
^' Cain in the social scale," he took his stand 
upon the lowest grade, and struck at all above 
him with dog-like ferocity, with insatiable malig- 
nity. Champion of the canaille, he fought their 
battles, and the " common cry of curs " was his. 
Denounced to the Constituent Assembly, hunted 
by the Paris Commune, besieged in his house 
by Lafayette ; shielded by Danton ; hidden by 
Legendre ; sheltered by the actress Fleury ; 
sheltered by the priest Bassal ; proscribed, pur- 
sued, and homeless, he still fought on, and the 
publication of V Ami du Peuple was not de- 
layed for a single hour. By the name that he 
had conquered, all Paris knew him. Woe to the 
noble who was " recommended " by the remorse- 
less " People's Friend 1 " Woe to the suspect 
who fell into the clutches of that crafty " Prussian 
Spider I " Day after day he might be seen at 
the Convention, — cynical, injurious, venomous ; 
dressed in a filthy shirt, a shabby, patched 
surtout, and ink-stained velvet smalls ; his hair 
knotted tightly with a thong, his shoes tied 



Marat. 



Mademoiselle de Cor day. 3 

carelessly with string. Men knew the enormous 
head and pallid, leaden face ; the sloping, wild- 
beast brows and piercing, tigerish eyes ; the 
croaking, "frog-like mouth;" the thin lips, 
bulged like an adder's poison-bag, — men knew 
the convulsive gestures, the irrepressible arm 
with its fluttering proscription list, the strident 
voice that cried incessantly for " heads, " — now 
for five hundred, now for five hundred thousand. 
All Paris knew the triumvir Marat, who, in 
concert with Robespierre and the Mountain, 
was slowly floating France in blood. 

It is easy, from the abundant records, to con- 
struct the story of his death. In July, 1793, the 
citizen Marat was ill. For three years he had 
struggled with a disorder, to which sooner or 
later he must have succumbed. His physician, 
although he sedulously attended him, had no 
hope of saving his life. He had ceased to 
appear at the meetings of the Convention ; 
Robespierre and Danton had refused him " a 
head or two." A Jacobin deputation, sent to 
inquire into his health, reported that they had 
found their brother Marat occupied unweariedly 
for the public good. "It is not a malady," 
said they^ " but an indisposition which Mes- 
sieurs of the C6t6 Droit will hardly catch. It is 
a superabundant patriotism pressed and repressed 



4 Four Frenchwomen. 

in too small a body. The violent efforts that it 
makes at escape are killing him." In a word, the 
citizen Marat was dying of disease aggravated by 
envy, disappointment, and unquenched lust of 
blood. During the whole of June he had never 
ceased — with a head frenzied by strong remedial 
stimulants, with a pen that pain caused to tremble 
in his hand — to cry feverishly for slaughter. 
These were, in fact, those " exhalations of a 
too active patriotism " that were killing the 
People's Friend. 

On the 13th of July, at about half-past seven 
in the evening, the citizen Marat was sitting in 
his bath, writing. The citizen certainly affected, 
perhaps actually enjoyed, the luxury of poverty. 
A rough board laid across the bath served him for 
a desk ; an unhewn block supported his inkstand. 
The floor was littered with numbers of his jour- 
nal, but the room was bare of furniture. A map 
of France hung upon the wall, together with a 
brace of pistols, above which was scrawled in 
large, bold letters, ^' La Mort." 

By-and-by comes in a young man named 
Pillet, bringing paper for the printing of UAmi 
du Peuple, which was done in the author's house. 
Marat asked him to open the window, approved 
his account, and sent him away. As he came 
out there was a kind of altercation between the 



Mademoiselle de Corday. 5 

portress, who was folding sheets, and a hand- 
some young lady, wearing a dark hat trimmed 
with green ribbons. She held a fan in her hand, 
and was complaining, in a singularly clear and 
musical voice, that she had come a long journey 
— all the way from Caen — to see the People's 
Friend, It appeared from the conversation 
that she had already called that day. " Had 
he received her note asking for an interview > " 
The portress scarcely knew, he had so many. 
At this moment appeared another woman — 
Simonne Evrard — who, listening to the im- 
portunities of the stranger, consented at last to 
see if Marat would receive her. Marat, who 
had read her note some twenty minutes pre- 
viously, answered in the affirmative, and the 
women showed her in. 

It is not exactly known what took place be- 
tween Marat and his visitor in their ten minutes' 
interview. According to her after account, he 
listened eagerly to the news from Caen, taking 
notes "■ for the scaffold " the while. He asked 
for the names of the Girondist deputies then 
refuged at that place. She gave them, — Guadet, 
Gorsas, Buzot, Barbaroux, and the rest. " C'est 
bien ! Dans peu de jours, je Us ferai guillotiner 
tons d Paris.'' His hour had come. Plucked 
suddenly from her bosom, a bright blade flashed 



6 Four Frenchwomen. 

up, down, and struck him once in the chest. A 
terrible blow for a delicate hand I — under the 
clavicle, sheer through the lung, cutting the 
carotid. ^' A moi, ma Mre amie, d moi ! ^' he 
shrieked. The next moment the room was full. 
The young lady, coming out, was struck down 
with a chair, and trampled on by the furious 
women ; the guard came pouring in, and down 
the street the news flew like wildfire that " they 
were killing the People's Friend." 

They lifted out the livid People's Friend, and 
laid him on his bed. But he had spoken his 
last. For an instant his glazed eyes turned upon 
Simonne Evrard, who was weeping at his side, 
then closed forever. Medical advice arriving 
post-haste was yet too late. His death had 
been anticipated by some eight days. 

Paris was in consternation. Was this the be- 
ginning of some dreadful vengeance upon the 
patriots, — some deep-laid Federalist conspiracy? 
They could not tell. Meanwhile, beware of 
green ribbons, and, above all, honour to the 
People's Friend. Men meeting each other in 
the street repeated like an old tragic chorus, 
*' // est mort, V Ami du Peuple ! V Ami du Peuple 
est mort ! " The Jacobins dressed his bust in 
crape ; the Convention voted him to the Pan- 
theon, where Mirabeau made room for him. 



Assassination of Marat. 



Mademoiselle de Corday, 7 

Senators called upon David to paint his death. 
*' Aussi le ferai-je, " answers he, with a magnif- 
icent wave of the arm. Clubs quarrelled for 
the body ; sections squabbled for the heart. An 
immense concourse conducted him to his grave. 
Twenty orators spoke over his tomb (decreed 
by a beautiful spirit of pastoral simplicity to that 
garden of the Cordeliers " where at evensong 
he was wont to read his journal to the people "), 
and scrupled not to link his name with names 
most sacred. Sculptors were found to carve his 
features with the glory of the Agonist, — to twist 
his foul headband into something of semblance 
to a crown of thorns. His bust became a safe- 
guard for the houses of patriots, his name a name 
for new-born children. Robespierre grew sick 
with envy, and was publicly twitted with his 
jealousy. The citizen Marat was a martyr, and 
the mob went mad about him. 

After a time came the reaction. Some scrib- 
bler studying the citizen's voluminous writings 
discovered a passage advocating monarchy, and 
straightway announced the fact. " What I 
Marat — the People's Friend — Marat a royalist? 
Le miserable ! " The rabble rose forthwith, 
burnt him in effigy, scraped up the ashes, hud- 
dled them into an unworthy urn, and hurrying it 
along with ribaldry and execration, flung it igno- 



8 Four Frenchwomen. 

miniously down a sewer in the Rue Montmartre. 
And this was the second funeral of the People's 
Friend, 



II. 

While the shrill voices of the newsvendors — 
*' hoarse heralds of discord" — were crying at 
Paris street-corners, " V'lci V Ombre du Patriate 
Mar-at I Eloge Funbhre de Mar-at ! Pani- 
gyrique de Mar-at ! " — while Adam Lux was 
furtively placarding her as the Joan of Arc of the 
Revolution, eager voices were curious con- 
cerning the mysterious assassin. '' A virago — d 
ce quil par ait ! Hommasse, gargonnidre — n'est- 
ce pas vrai, Citoyen )"" A monster, a fury, with 
crime written in her face. Does n't Capuchin 
Chabot expressly say a monster } — ^' such a one 
as Nature vomits forth now and then to the 
mischief of humanity." This and more, more 
energetically expressed. For, as may be seen, 
the Parisians preferred their criminals in the 
staring and unmistakable colours of the romantic 
drama. 

By-and-by the gossipers knew all that could 
be told, and Paris to this day knows little more. 
They heard that her name was Marie-Anne- 
Charlotte de Corday d' Armont ; that her father 



Mademoiselle de Cor day. 9 

was a gentleman living at Argentan, of broken 
means, and crippled with a law-suit ; that her 
life was blameless and her beauty great ; that, 
horrified by the revolutionary excesses, she had 
conceived the idea of freeing France by killing 
Marat ; that, uncounselled and alone, she had 
set out from Caen to carry out her project, and 
to fling away her being in return. These were 
the undoubted facts of her history. It remains 
to show how peculiarly her character, education, 
and surroundings tended to thrust her onward 
to that last act. 

Her father, poor as we have said, had dis- 
tributed his children amongst his wealthier re- 
lations. Marie was assigned to an uncle at 
Vieques, the Abb^ de Corday, who took charge 
of her education. He taught her to read in an 
old copy, religiously preserved by himself, of the 
works of their common ancestor, Corneille. 
Already, in the pages of the seventeenth century 
Roman, she found the germ of that republic 
which became the ideal of her life. For, as she 
subsequently said, she was a republican long 
before the Revolution. 

Her mother died. Then, at fourteen years 
of age, she was invited to the Abbaye aux 
Dames by the abbess, Madame de Belzunce. 
In those days the itch political — the current 



lo Four Frenchwomen, 

philosophy — had invaded even the solitude 
of the convents. Her true friends to her — - 
motherless actually, virtually brotherless and 
fatherless — w^ere her books. To her rehgious 
exercises she added long readings, longer re- 
veries. The seed that sprang in Corneille w^as 
trained and fostered by her now '' favourite au- 
thors/' Plutarch, Raynal, and the political vv^orks 
of Rousseau. Like Madame Roland, she early 
began to regret that she had not been born a 
Cornelia or Paulina, to sigh for the ^' heaux 
jours " of Sparta and of Rome. The French 
were not v^^orthy of her republic, w^ith " its 
austere virtues and its sublime devotion." 
" Our nation," she said, " is too light, too 
trifling ; it needs retempering, regenerating, — 
needs to seek in the errors of the past the tra- 
dition of the great and true, the beautiful and 
noble ; to forget all those frivolities which beget 
the corruption and degeneration of a people." 
The rumours of atrocities — ga-ira echoes — 
which reached her in her quiet retreat filled her 
with horror and dismay. But while she de- 
tested the men of the Revolution, she remained 
true throughout life to her political theories. 

In 1787 Madame de Belzunce died. Later 
the convents were suppressed. The young girl, 
after a short visit to her father, sought an asylum 



Mademoiselle de Cor day. ii 

with a cousin, Madame de Bretteville, who, as 
she quaintly phrased it, did not know her visitor 
*' from Eve or Adam," but nevertheless received 
her hospitably. Here she remained until her 
final journey to Paris. 

Madame de Bretteville lived in an old, gloomy, 
semi-Gothic house, called the Grand Manoir. 
Mile, de Corday mixed to a slight extent in 
the Caen society, and more particularly with the 
royalist family of Faudoas. She was remarked 
for her beauty and sweetness. She was a good 
musician, sketched cleverly, and talked with 
great clearness and brilliancy. Her letters, 
chiefly running on matters political, were handed 
about with a certain ostentation by those who 
received them. At this time she had many ad- 
mirers, — men who, years after, trembled when 
they heard her name, a voice like hers ; but 
her aversion to marriage was well known. An 
anecdote related by her friend, Madame Loyer 
de Maromme, will bring her before the reader. 

Some of Madame de Bretteville's friends were 
leaving Caen, and before their departure she 
gave them a farewell dinner. Among the guests 
was a M. de Tourndlis, a cousin of Marie, who 
regarded her with no slight admiration. The 
dinner passed off" well until the king's health 
was proposed. Mile, de Corday remained un- 



12 Four Frenchwomen, 

moved. " What/' said a lady, touching her 
elbow, "you won't drink the king's health, — 
the king, so good, so virtuous ? " "I believe him 
virtuous," she returned in her low, sweet tones, 
" but a weak king cannot be a good one ; he 
cannot check the misfortunes of his people." A 
dead silence succeeded this reply ; the health 
was nevertheless drunk, and the company sat 
down, visibly ill at ease. 

A few moments after, the new bishop, Fau- 
chet, made his entry into Caen, escorted by a 
triumphal procession crying — " Vive la Nation ! 
Vive VEv^que Constitutionnel! " M. de Tourndis 
and M. de Corday, jun., exasperated, attempted 
to answer by cries of " Vive le Roi ! " and were 
with great difficulty restrained from doing so. 
M. de Corday silenced his son, and Marie 
pulled M. de Tournelis to the back of the 
room. 

" How is It," said she to the imprudent gen- 
tleman, whose arm she still held, " how is It 
that you are not afraid of risking the lives of 
those about you by your intemperate manifesta- 
tions ? If you would serve your country so, 
you had far better not go away." 

" And why^ mademoiselle," he returned im- 
petuously, •' why did you not just now fear to 
wound the feelings of /our friends by refusing 



Mademoiselle de Cor day. 13 

to join your voice to a toast so French, and so 
dear to all of us ? " 

" My refusal," she replied, smiling, " can 
only injure me. But you, without any use- 
ful end, would risk the lives of all about you. 
On whose side, tell me, is the most generous 
sentiment ? " 

My refusal can only injure me. Springing, 
perhaps, at first, from her solitary meditations ; 
growing daily as she daily learns new details of 
the excesses of the time, for during a two 
years' space, she reads some five hundred pam- 
phlets ; fortified by the indignant protest which 
*' her master," Raynal, addressed to the Con- 
stituent Assembly, — the ruling idea of Marie de 
Corday had become a complete detachment 
from her individual existence, — a desire to offer 
up her life, if her life could be useful to her 
country. " What fate awaits us ? " writes she 
to Madame de Maromme. " A frightful des- 
potism. If they succeed in curbing the people, 
' tis to fall from Charybdis into Scylla ; on 
every side we suffer. . . . One can die but 
once ; and what consoles me for the horror of 
our situation, is that no one will lose in losing- 
me.'' Later, writing to Mile. Rose Fougeron 
du Fayot of this terrible news of the king's 
death (1793), she says that if she could, she 



14 Four Frenchwomen. 

would fly to England, " But," she adds, 
" God holds us here for other destinies,'' The 
idea was there, without the name. The arrival 
of the proscribed Girondists at Caen found her 
ripe for the execution of her scheme. 

The struggle between the Mountain and the 
Gironde had drawn to the close. The Monta= 
guards had accused the Girondists of conniving 
with the foreigner. Guadet had replied by a 
counter-charge against Marat, and Marat was 
sent to that revolutionary tribunal which he 
himself had instituted. Judges and jury rose 
en masse, and, without more to-do, declared 
him innocent. A mob formed on the spot 
crowned him with oak, and, led by a sapper 
named Rocher, brandishing his axe, carried him 
on their shoulders to the Convention, before 
which they defiled, according to custom, subse- 
quently dancing the carmagnole, deputies, sap- 
per, and all. This triumph of Marat was the 
death-knell of the Gironde. Soon after, the 
twenty-two deputies were proscribed, and 
some eighteen of them took refuge at Caen. 

The arrival of the discarded senators was 
hailed with enthusiasm by Marie de Corday. 
These were republicans after her own heart, — 
latter-day Romans, disciples of Brutus. They 
would save the country from its miserable assas- 



Mademoiselle de Cor day, 15 

sins, restore the peace of which she dreamed. 
The petition of a friend lent her a pretext for 
introducing herself to Barbaroux. With the 
" Antinoiis of Marseilles " (grown at this time 
excessively fat and cumbrous, by the way) she 
had numerous interviews, lengthy discussions 
upon the position of affairs. It is probable that 
in these last her project took its definite shape. 
The Girondist orator painted to her, as he well 
knew how to do, that sanguinary Montagnard 
triumvirate, — the remorseless and terrible Dan- 
ton ; Robespierre, cunning as a Bengalee, cruel 
as a tiger ; Marat, the jackal of the guillotine, 
nauseous, ignoble, and drunk with blood, — - 
Marat, too, who had compassed their downfall. 
Mile, de Corday's choice was made. That 
choice, however, she kept a secret. All knowl- 
edge of her intent was subsequently strenuously 
denied by the deputies who knew her while 
at Caen. 

The Girondists had hoped to organise a 
counter-revolution, — to form a departmental 
army to march upon Paris, and insure the safety 
of the Convention ; but the business languished. 
*' Unwearied orators, incorrigible Utopists," in^ 
consequent democrats, — they were voices, and 
nothing more. Puisaye had gathered two thou- 
sand men at Evreux ; Wimpffen called for the 



1 6 Four Frenchwomen, 

volunteers at Caen. Seventeen men quitted the 
ranks. The sight of this devoted little band 
only served to strengthen the purpose of Mile, 
de Corday. " A woman's hand should check 
the civil war," she said; "a woman's hand 
prepare the peace.'' She had already procured 
a passport for Paris, already bade adieu to her 
friends, and two days after, she left for the 
capital. 

None, we say, knew of her intent. Her os- 
tensible purpose was the serving of an old con- 
vent friend, for whom Barbaroux had interested 
himself. Long after her death, little anecdotes 
cropped up which show her inflexible decision. 
Passing through the shop of the carpenter Lu- 
nel, on the ground-floor of the Grand Manoir, 
she suddenly, to the astonishment of the good 
man, who was playing cards with his wife, broke 
out into an involuntary " No ; it shall be never 
said that a Marat reigned over France ! " and 
struck the table sharply with her hand. Her 
books she distributed, keeping perhaps an odd 
volume of Plutarch out of all. To the carpen- 
ter's son, Louis Lunel, she gave her portfolio 
and her crayon-holder, bidding him not to for- 
get her, as he would never see her more. When 
saying good-bye to one of her friends, she 
kissed the son^ a boy of sixteen or thereabouts. 



Mademoiselle de Cor day. ly 

M, Malfilatre grew up to be a man ; and when 
he died, as late as 1851, he still remembered 
with pride the last kiss that Marie de Corday 
ever gave on earth. 

Then comes the anecdote of M. de Lamar- 
tine, which is at least hen trovato. Fronting 
the Grand Manoir lodged a family named La- 
couture. The son of the house, a skilful musi- 
cian, was used to practise regularly in the 
mornings at his piano. He had noticed that 
whenever he began to play, his opposite neigh- 
bour thrust open her shutters, and sat some- 
times half-hidden by the curtain, and apparently 
listening to the music. Encouraged by the daily 
apparition of the lady, the musician never failed 
to play, — Mane never to fling open the shut- 
ters. This went on regularly up to the day 
which preceded her departure for Paris. That 
day she opened, then closed the shutters sud- 
denly and sharply. On the morrow, they re- 
mained obstinately shut. Slowly the notes stole 
out upon the air, but the dark casement showed 
no sign. Thus the musician knew that his lis- 
tener was gone. 



1 8 Four Frenchwomen, 



III. 



There are two trustworthy portraits of Mile, 
de Corday. The one, attributed to Siccardi, and 
preserved at Caen, represents a magnificent 
young woman of three-and-twenty, in all the 
exuberance, all the omnipotence of youth and 
beauty, — strong and yet graceful, elegantly 
natural, modest above all, and still of a com- 
pelling presence. Her hair, of a beautiful 
chestnut tinge, escapes from the fluttering laces 
of her Norman C30, and falls in torrents on the 
white, close-drawn kerchief about her shoulders. 
Her eyes were grey and somewhat sad, shaded 
by deep, dark lashes. Her brows were finely 
arched, her face " a perfect oval," and her com- 
plexion " marvellously brilliant.'' " She blushed 
very readily, and became then, in reality, charm- 
ing.'' Add to these a strangely musical voice, 
singularly silvery and childlike, and an expres- 
sion of " ineffable sweetness," and you may 
conceive something of that Marie de Corday 
whom men loved at Caen. 

The other, painted by Hauer in her cell; and 
wearing originally the red shirt of the mur- 
deress, is that Charlotte Corday of the Con- 
ciergerie whom death is nearing quickly, stride 



Mademoiselle de Corday, 
after Hauer. 



fmm^ ^'-''^mwTrwj 



> LEIZJ 




Mademoiselle de Cor day 19 

on stride. White-robed, white-capped, the fig- 
ure is peaceful, statuesque, and calm. Some- 
thing, perhaps, of severity sits upon the feat- 
ures ; something, perhaps, of sorrow in the eyes. 
Not sorrow for the deed ; rather the shadow 
of her long-nursed purpose, — the shadow of 
those long, lonely hours in the Grand Manoir ; 
the shadow of that loveless, hopeless, end- 
less woman's life she values at so little. For 
herself she is perfectly at ease. Her duty 
done, what remains the rest may do. She has 
prepared the peace. She had done " a thing 
which should go throughout all generations to the 
children of the nation,'" 

Peace — "the Peace'' — is her paramount 
idea. Her famous letter, written ostensibly to 
Barbaroux, but in reality her political Apologia, 
is dated the Second day of the Preparation for 
Peace, '^ Peace at all price," she writes, " must 
be procured." " For the last two days she has 
enjoyed a delicious peace.'' There is a certain 
forced gaiety — a calculated flippancy — an af- 
fectation of stoicism about this manifesto which 
is well-nigh painful. Yet she cannot wholly dis- 
guise the elevation of the heroine, who feels " no 
fear of death," who " values life only as it can 
be useful to her kind." This letter, begun at the 
Abbaye, finished at the Conciergerie, was never 



20 Four Frenchwomen. 

delivered. In far simpler and far more touching 
words she takes leave of her father : — 

Pardonnis-moi mon Cher papa (T avoir disposd 
de mon Existance sans votre permission, Jai vengi 
bien d'innocentes victimes, jai prevenu bien d'au- 
tres ddsastres, le peuple un jour desahusi, se re- 
jouira dHre delivri d'un tyrran, Si j'ai cherM a 
vous persuade que je passais en angleterre, cesque 
jesperais garder lincognito mais jen ai reconu 
limpossibilite. Jespere que vous ne seris point 
tourmente en tons cas je crois que vous auriSs des 
defenseurs a Caen, jai pris pour defenseur Gus- 
tave Doulcet, un tel attentat ne permet nulle de- 
fense Cest pour la forme, adieu mon Cher papa 
je vous prie de moublier^ ou plutdt de vous rejouir 
de mon sort la cause en est belle, Tembrasse ma 
sceur que jaime de tout mon coeur ainsi qui tons 
mes parens, noubliis pas ce vers de Corneille. 
" Le crime fait la honte et non pas T^chafaud." 

Cest demain a huit heures que Von me juge, 
ce 1 6 Juillet. 

CORDAY. 

Corde et ore was the motto of the Armont 
family. Corde et ore before the dark bench of 
the Salle de TEgalit^, she sustained the deed 
that she had done. Impossible for the legal 
catches of President Montana to surprise any 



Mademoiselle de Cor day, 21 

avowal of complicity. Answer after answer 
comes from her, prompt, to the point, clear- 
stamped with the image of truth, concise as a 
couplet of Corneille. Like Judith of old, " all 
marvelled at the beauty of her countenance." 
The musical voice seemed to dominate the as- 
sembly, — the criminal to sit in judgment on her 
judges. She had killed Marat for his crimes, — 
the miseries that he had caused. The thought 
was hers alone ; her hatred was enough ; she 
best could execute her project. She has killed 
one man to save a thousand ; a villain to save 
innocents ; a savage wild beast to give her 
country Peace. " Do you think, then, to have 
killed all the Marats ? " " This one dead, the 
rest will fear — perhaps." " You should be 
skilful at the work," says crafty Fouquier-Tin- 
ville, remarking on the sureness of the stroke. 
" The monster I He takes me for an assassin ! " 
Her answer closed the debates like a sudden 
clap of thunder. The reading of her letters 
followed. "Have you anything to add?" 
says Montand, as the one to Barbaroux was 
finished. " Set down this/' she returned : 
" The leader of anarchy is no more ; you 
will have peace/' Nothing was left but to 
demand her head, which the public accuser 
did at once. 



22 Four Frenchwomen, 

The form of a defence was gone through. 
She had called upon a friend — the M. Doulcet 
of the letter to her father ; her request had 
never reached him. Montana named Chau- 
veau de la Garde. But she had confessed 
everything : there v^as nothing to say. How 
could he please her best ? When he rose a 
murmur filled the room. During the reading of 
the accusation, the judge had bid him plead 
madness^ the jury to hold his tongue. Either 
plan was contrived to humiliate her. La Garde 
read in her anxious eyes that she would not be 
excused. Like a gallant gentleman as he was, 
he took his perilous cue. " The accused,'' he 
said, " avows her crime, acknowledges its long 
premeditation, confesses to all its terrible de- 
tails. This immovable calm, this entire self- 
abnegation — in some respects sublime — are not 
in nature. They are only to be explained by 
that exaltation of political fanaticism which has 
placed a dagger in her hand. . . . Gentlemen 
of the jury, I leave your decision to the care 
of your prudence." 

The, face of the prisoner filled with pleasure. 
All fear of that dreadful plea, insanity, was at 
an end. She heard the sentence unmoved, 
after which she begged the gendarmes to lead 
her to La Garde. " Monsieur," she said, " I 



Mademoiselle de Cor day. 23 

thank you warmly for the courage with which 
you have defended me, in a manner worthy of 
yourself and of me. These gentlemen " — 
turning to the judges — "confiscate my goods, 
but I will give you a greater proof of my 
gratitude : I ask you to pay my prison debts, 
and I count upon your generosity." It need 
hardly be said that the duty was religiously 
performed. 

During the trial she had noticed a person 
sketching her, and had courteously turned her 
face towards him. This was Jacques Hauer, 
an officer of the National Guard. As soon as 
she returned to the prison, she expressed to the 
concierge a desire to see him. The painter 
came. She offered in the few minutes that re- 
mained to her to give him a sitting, begging 
him at the same time to copy the portrait for 
her friends, calmly talking of indifferent matters, 
and now and then of the deed that she had done. 
One hour, then half-an-hour, passed away ; the 
door opened, and Sanson appeared with the 
scissors and the red shirt. " What, already?" 
she asked. She cut off a long lock of her beau- 
tiful hair and offered it to Hauer, saying that 
she had nothing else to give him, and resigned 
the rest to the executioner. Her brilliant com- 
plexion had not faded, her lips were red as ever. 



24 Four Frenchwomen. 

She still '* enjoyed a delicious peace." The 
crimson shirt added so strangely to her weird 
beauty that the artist put it in the picture ; but, 
as we have said, it was afterwards painted out. 
She asked Sanson if she might wear her gloves, 
showing her wrist bruised by the brutal way in 
which they had tied her hands. He told her 
that he could arrange it without giving her pain. 
**True," said she, gaily, "they have not all 
your practice." 

The cart was waiting outside. When she 
came out the " furies of the guillotine " greeted 
her with a howl of execration. But even on 
these, says Klause, a look of the wonderful eyes 
often imposed a sudden silence. Calmly she 
mounted the tumbril, and the horse set out along 
the road it knew so well. Upright, unmoved, 
and smiling, she made the whole of the journey. 
The cart got on but slowly through the dense- 
packed crowd, and Sanson heard her sigh. 
"You find it a long journey?" he asked. 
" Bah r' said she, serenely, with the old musical 
voice unshaken, "we are sure to get there 
at lasto" Sanson stepped in front of her as 
they neared the scaffold, to hide the guillotine ; 
but she bent before him, saying, " I have a 
good right to be curious, for I have never 
seen one." 



Mademoiselle de Cor day, 25 

The red sun dipped down behind the Champs 
Elys^es trees as she went up the steps. The 
blood rushed to her cheek ; the covering on her 
neck was roughly torn away, and for an instant 
she stood in the ruddy light as if transfiguredc 
Then, in a solemn silence, the axe fell. A hound 
named Legros (a temporary aid of Sanson's) 
lifted up the pale, beautiful head, with all its 
frozen sweetness, and struck it on the cheek. 
Report says that it reddened to the blow. But 
whether it really blushed, whether the wretch's 
hands were wet with blood, or whether it was 
an effect of the sunlight, will now be never 
known. The crowd, by an almost universal 
murmur, testified its disapprobation. So died 
Marie de Corday, aged twenty-four years, 
eleven months, and twenty days. She was 
buried in the Madeleine, and afterwards re- 
moved to the cemetery Montparnasse, 

Inseparable from her last hours is the figure 
of the Mentz deputy and German dreamer, 
Adam Lux. He saw her on the way to the 
scaffold, — went mad at the splendid sight, — 
grew drunk with death. He courted the axe ; 
it was glorious to die with her ^ for her. In a 
long, printed eulogium, he proposed that she 
should have a statue, with the motto, Greater 



26 Four Frenchwomen, 

than Brutus. He was tried, sent to the scaf- 
fold, and went rejoicing," crying that " now, at 
last, he should die for the sake of Charlotte 
Corday." 

But although the Mentz deputy glorified the 
heroine, he did not glorify the deed; nor do we. 
In the true spirit of that life-maker's motto, 
to " nothing extenuate, or set down aught in 
malice," we are bound to condemn her act. 
Many a voice has been raised in defence of 
political assassination. For us, the knife makes 
the crime. Has it not been written, — "Ven- 
geance is mine, saith the Lord : / will repay " ? 
The sin of Marie de Corday was twofold : sin, 
as the shedding of blood is sin ; sin, as an usur- 
pation of the Right Divine to punish. Nor did 
the result justify the means. The Hydra of the 
Terror had other heads than Marat's. He, in- 
deed, was gone ; but had the guillotine no 
jackals in Fouquier-Tinville and Robespierre > 
Was there no infamous Phe Duchesne to suc- 
ceed to the Ami du Peuple ) Enthusiasm no 
doubt existed, but for her alone. Her prepa- 
ration for Peace only further inflamed the Revo- 
lutionary Tribunal, only hurried swifter to their 
doom the unfortunate Twenty- two. It lifted 
Marat into a bloody martyrdom, sent to the 



Mademoiselle de Corday. 27 

scaffold an unoffending Lauze de Perret, a hap- 
less Adam Lux. Yet while our colder reasons 
condemn, our warmer hearts excuse. We are 
free, granting her error, to forgive its mistaken 
motive, free to admire her unselfish devotion 
and the sublimity of her end. 



MADAME ROLAND. 
1754-1793- 



" Unefemme qui etait un grand homme.''* 

Louis Blanc. 

" Elle avait I'ame republicaine dans un 
corps petri de graces et fa9onne par 
une certaine politesse de cour." 

RiouFFE. Memoires (Vun Detenu* 



Madame Roland. 



MADAME ROLAND. 
I. 

TN the fall of 1863, a young man called upon 
-'- a bookseller of the Quai Voltaire with a 
bundle of dusty documents under his arm. 
" They had been his father's ; they were noth- 
ing to him : what would Monsieur give for 
them ? '' Monsieur, looking over them, does 
not think them very interesting, and declines 
to bid for the treasure. " But," says the young 
man, " there are others," and on two successive 
occasions he appears with more yellow manu- 
scripts. Finally the bookseller offers fifty 
francs for the whole. " Fifty francs be it, 
then 1 " And the heaps being shaken, sorted, 
and arranged, are found to include memoirs 
of the Girondists Louvet and Petion ; auto- 
graph of the Girondist Buzot ; tragedy of 
Charlotte Corday, by the Girondist Salles ; 
and, best of all, jipe letters of the famous 
Madame Roland. 

Stranger still, this discovery was closely 
connected with another made some months be- 
fore, in March. A savant, well known for his 



32 Four Frenchwomen, 

revolutionary researches, prowling about in the 
market at Batignolles, had happened upon the 
miniature of a man, in sad dilapidation, and 
dragging on the ground among a heap of vege- 
tables. Its glass had gone, its canvas had curled 
and cracked ; but behind the picture was a piece 
of folded paper, cut to the size of the portrait, 
and covered closely with Madame Roland's 
well-known writing. These two discoveries, 
taken in connection with each other, clasped 
at once the hands of two hitherto unrecognised 
lovers, and settled forever a question which had 
been often asked, but never answered until 
then. 

Love in the earlier years of Madame Roland 
had assumed a curious disguise. He had ap- 
peared to her in the cap and gown of a school- 
man, and had left his heart behind in the hurry 
of packing. Self-educated and secluded, she 
had ranged all literature, learning to read in 
Plutarch, graduating in Rousseau, — and both 
had left their marks. Handsome, ardent, af- 
fectionate, and sensitive, she had, nevertheless, 
listened to the voice of her imagination and the 
echoes of her studies until she had forgotten 
her feelings. Love for her had become a mat- 
ter of stoical calculation ; marriage a prudent 
philosophical bargain, to be controlled by a 



Madame Roland. 33 

maxim of the Portico, a quotation from Emile. 
At twenty-five she had married — always en phi- 
losophe — a staid, stiff man of five-and-forty, an 
inspector of manufactures at Lyons, who be 
came a minister at Paris, and scandalised thq 
court by his Puritan costume, his round hat, 
and the strings in his shoes. Him she had 
aided, elevated, and afterwards eclipsed. 
Thrown suddenly into society, then queen of 
a coterie of young and eloquent enthusiasts, 
dreaming dangerously of being " the happiness 
of one and the bond of many," she had early 
discovered that " among those around her there 
were some men whom she might love ; " and al- 
though she strictly obeyed the dictates of duty, 
it was shrewdly suspected that the some one 
had been found. Who was it ? Who was the 
*' /oi que je nose nommer'' of her memoirs? 
What passion was this from which her riper 
years so narrowly escaped ? Michelet and 
Sainte-Beuve had touched the traces of a 
hardly-conquered inclination for Bancal des Is- 
sarts. But who could it be } Was it Barba- 
roux, the " Antinoiis of Marseilles.^" Was it 
Bosc the devoted, Lanthenas the friend of the 
family ? Was it Buzot ? It was Buzot. The 
letters were to Buzot, the portrait was Buzot's, 
and the riddle was solved. Already clearl}; 

3 



34 Four Frenchwomen, 

drawn by her own faithful pencil, the great 
truth-teller Time had added the completing 
touches. No longer darkly seen, the stately 
figure stands out upon the threshold of the 
Revolution, secure in its singular nobility, with 
all its errors undisguised, and makes " appeal 
to impartial posterity." 

When, in Moli^re's play, the learned (and in- 
tolerable) M. Thomas Dlafoirus pays his court 
to Mile. Ang^lique, he politely presents her 
with an elaborate thesis against the circulation 
of the blood, pour faire son chemin. In 1790 
the successful suitor came laden with the Con- 
trat Social in his pocket, or to-morrow's decla- 
mation in his hand. On that high road to ladies' 
favour the surest passport was some florid phi- 
lippic against Robespierre or Marat, some 
high-pitched prospectus of the approaching 
" Reign of Reason." Politics had invaded 
all the salons, driving before them the sonnets 
and bouts-rim^s, effacing the dclat of the Dorats 
and Bernis. From the crowded court where 
Madame de Stael swayed the sceptre, to its 
faintest provincial copy, whose " inferior priest- 
ess " fired her friends with her enthusiasm and 
burnt her fingers with her tea, the political spirit 
had swept down all before it. 

Arrived in the capital in 1791, Madame 



Bu{ot. 



Madame Roland, 35 

Roland, already in her Lyons retreat a decided 
republican, already a contributor to the patriot 
journal of her friend Champagneux, already in 
correspondence with the all-pervading Brissot, 
flung herself headlong into the popular current. 
Her house at Paris became a rendezvous for 
Brissot's friends. The elegant hostess, w^ho, 
silent at first in the animated discussions, only 
showed her scorn or her sympathy by a sudden 
elevation of the brows, a glance of the speak- 
ing eyes, became the ^' Egeria " of the gath- 
ering Gironde. The little third-floor of the 
H6tel Britannique, Rue Gu^negaud, became 
a very grotto of the Camenas. Round her — 
centre and soul of the coalition — flocked its 
famous and ill-fated leaders. Here nightly was 
to be seen that journalist adventurer Brissot, its 
hand as she was its head ; here, too, came the 
unknown lover Buzot, "heart of fire and soul 
of iron," drinking a perilous eloquence in those 
beautiful eyes ; here, too, even Danton, even 
Robespierre, made fitful apparitions, and, con- 
spicuous among the rest, might be distinguished 
the '^ grave" Petion, the philosopher Condor- 
cet, and last but not least, her husband, the 
*' virtuous " Roland. 

Hardly to be detached, therefore, from the 
story of the Girondists, are the later years of 



36 Four Frenchwomen, 

Madame Roland's life. But our concern, at 
present, lies more with the woman than the 
politician — more with Marie-Jeanne, or Manon 
Phlipon the engraver's daughter, than the all- 
conquering wife of the popular statesman. His- 
torically, perhaps, a few words are necessary. 
First a commissioner to the National Assembly 
(1791), then Minister of the Interior under 
Dumouriez (1792), Roland was materially in- 
fluenced, ably aided, by his wife. When Louis 
XVI. refused to sanction the decree for the 
banishment of the priests, the minister, using 
his wife's pen^ addressed to the king a remon- 
strance which procured his dismissal. 

The Faubourg St. Antoine rose, the king was 
removed to the Temple, and Roland was re- 
called. Loudly and ineffectually he protested 
against the savage September massacres in the 
prisons. Then the pair became objects for the 
enmity of the terrible Montague. Madame 
Roland was charged with corresponding with 
England. The address and dexterity of her 
defence baffled her opponents, Danton and Ro- 
bespierre. At last Roland was arrested, but 
escaped. His wife was thrown into the Abbaye, 
liberated, re-arrested, and taken to St. Pelagic ; 
thence to the Conciergerie, and thence, on 
November 8th, 1793, to the guillotine. 



Madame Roland. 37 

During her imprisonment she wrote her per- 
sonal memoirs (which she was not able to com- 
plete), Notices Historiques of her political circle, 
Portraits et Anecdotes, and the five letters to 
Buzot which have already been mentioned. 



II. 



There are many reasons which render these 
*' confidences," as they have been called, singu- 
larly genuine and authentic. Like many of the 
records of that time, they were written under 
the axe. At such a moment, to palter with pos- 
terity — to mince and simper to the future — 
were worse than useless. With the beautiful 
Duchess of Gramont, who was asked whether 
she had helped the emigrants, the authors seem 
to say, " I was going to answer ' No,' but life 
is not worth the lie." And one and all, writing 
in the shadow of death, catch something of 
sublime simplicity. In the present case there 
are other reasons still. When Madame Roland 
planned her memoirs she was thinking of the 
greatest work of her great model, Rousseau. 
*' These," she said to a friend, " will be m/ 
* Confessions,' for I shall conceal nothing." A 
mistaken idea, perhaps, but one which lends an 



38 Four Frenchwomen, 

additional value to the words. Lastly, we have 
in them the first rapidly-conceived expression, 
the accent, as it were, of her soul. As she 
hurries on, driven by inexorable haste, now, at 
some prison news, breaking into a patriotic de- 
fence of her defeated party, now again seekmg 
peace in the half-light of her childish memories, 
now listening to the supper-table clamour of 
the actresses in the next cell, now in a sudden 
panic tearing off the completed MS. to send to 
Bosc, who will hide it in a rock in the forest of 
Montmorency, one experiences all the charm of 
an intimate conversation ; one feels that these 
papers are, so to speak, proof impressions of 
her state of mind. Composed with all the easy 
fluency and something of the na'ive cultivation 
of Sdvign^, they were scribbled furtively, under 
the eye of a gaoler^ on coarse grey paper pro- 
cured by the favour of a turnkey, and often 
blotted with her tears. The large quarto vol- 
ume of MSS. is still in existence. Its fine bold 
writing is hardly corrected, never retouched. 
The writer had no time for erasure, revision, or 
ornament, and barely time to tell the truth. 

Manon Phlipon hardly recollects when she 
first learned to read. But from the age of four 
she reads with excessive avidity, devouring every- 
thing with a perfect rage for study. Rising at 



Madame Roland, 39 

five, when all is quiet in the house, she slips on 
her little jacket, and steals on tiptoe to the table 
in the corner of her mother's room, there to re- 
peat and prepare her lessons for the patient mas- 
ter whom she nicknamed M. Doiicet. She is 
never without a book. Now it is the Bible, or 
the Lives of the Saints ; now Telemachus, or 
the Memoirs of Mile, de M ontp easier ; now the 
Recovery of Jerusalem, or the Roman Coniique 
of Scarron. Tasso and Fenelon set the child- 
brain on fire ; as she reads she realises. " I 
was Erminia for Tancred, and Eucharis for Te- 
lemachus." Plutarch so captivated her at nine 
that she carried him to church instead of mass- 
book. Nothing is too dry ; " she would have 
learnt the Koran by heart if they had taught 
her to read it ; " she astonishes her father by 
her knowledge of heraldry ; even tries the Lau^ 
of Contracts ; and, later still, sets to and copies 
out a treatise on geometry — plates and all. 

Nor was this one of the pale little prodigies 
whose intellect has been developed at the ex- 
pense of their physique. Manon had excellent 
health, and these are not all her accomplish- 
ments. This child, who read serious books, 
explained the circles of the celestial sphere, 
handled crayon and burin, and was at eight the 
best dancer in a party of children older than 



40 Four Frenchwomen. 

herself — this child was quite at home in the 
kitchen. " I should be able to make my soup 
as easily as Phiiopoemen [in her favourite Plu- 
tarch] cut his wood ; but no one would imagine 
that it was a duty fitted for me to perform." 
There is a secret in that last sentence which 
may be safely recommended to housekeepers 
in posse. 

In those days, perhaps more than now, a first 
communion was a great event in a child's life. 
At eleven years of age her religious studies have 
so mastered her, that with tears in her eyes she 
begs her parents "to do a thing which her con- 
science demands, to place her in a convent,'' in 
order to prepare for it. It is all here. She has 
charmingly painted her convent friends — the 
colombe gemissante, Sister Agatha, the Sisters 
Henriette and Sophie Cannet (her correspon- 
dence with whom — from 1772 to 1786 — is 
" the origin of her taste for writing"), the con- 
vent life, a fete, and the installation of a novice. 

With the Dames de la Congregation she stayed 
a year. A succeeding year was spent with her 
grandmother in the He St. Louis. The little 
household is pleasantly touched in ; her grand- 
mother — brisk, amiable, and young at sixty- 
five ; her grandmother's sister, Mademoiselle 
Rotisset, pious, asthmatic, always seriously 



Madame Roland. 41 

knitting, and everybody's servant. Then she 
describes her visit to a great lady, whose airs 
and patronage disgust the little republican who 
has already begun to reason shrewdly upon 
nobility of intellect and questions of degree. 

'' ' Eh! bonjour,'' said Madame de Boismorel 
in a loud, cold voice, and rising at our approach. 
' Bonjour, Mademoiselle Rotisset.' (Mademoi- 
selle ? What I My bonne maman is here Ma- 
demoiselle?) 'Well, I am glad to see you; 
and this pretty child is your grandchild, eh ? 
Ah, she will improve. Come here, mon cceur 
— here, next me. She is timid. How old is 
she, your grandchild, Mademoiselle Rotisset } 
She is a little dark, but the base of the skm is 
excellent ; 't will clear before long. She 's al- 
ready well shaped. You should have a lucky 
hand, little woman ; have you ever put into the 
lottery ? ' 

" ' Never, madame ; I don't like games of 
chance.' 

" ' I believe you ; at your age one expects 
to be certain. What a voice I how sweet and 
full it is I But how grave we are 1 Are n't you 
a wee bit divote } ' 

" ' I know my duties, and I try to fulfil them.' 

" * Capital I You want to be a nun, don't 
you 



;' 



42 Four Frenchwomen. 

" ' I ignore my destiny ; I don't yet seek to 
determine it.' 

" ' Bless me, how sententious I She reads_, 
your grandchild, Mademoiselle Rotisset ? ' 

" ' It is her greatest pleasure ; she reads half 
the day.' 

" ' Oh, one can see that ; but take care that 
she does n't become a blue-stockmg — 't would 
be a thousand pities.' " 

Thereupon the elder ladies fell to talking of 
their little maladies — of Abb6 This and Coun- 
cillor That — and, in order to sprinkle the 
sprightly conversation with the requisite spice 
of scandal, of a certain beauty somewhat "on 
the return," whose misfortune it is to forget 
everything except her age. Meanwhile Made- 
moiselle Manon, perched on the edge of her 
seat, feels very hot and uncomfortable, and 
sorely disconcerted by the cold boldness of the 
great lady's eyes which stare at her every now 
and then over her plastered cheeks. The proud 
little student of Plutarch, mutely measuring her- 
self v/ith her entertainer, sickens at her patron- 
age and assumption of superiority, as later she 
will sicken at " that lank yellow hackney," Ma- 
demoiselle de Hannaches, whose pretensions to 
pedigree are everywhere respected — as later 
she will sicken at the obsequious mummeries 



Madame Roland, 43 

of Versailles. She has already the germ of all 
that fierce hatred of royalty which was so un- 
worthy of her ; and although in the memoirs 
she has doubtless clothed her recollections with 
something of the amplitude of her maturer style, 
the picture in feeling is vividly true. For the 
Manon of the visit and the chronicler of later 
years are not at all unlike. Her character was 
of a composition that hardens early, and be- 
tween the child of twelve and the woman of 
forty the difference is not so great. 

When at last she returned to her parents, 
Mademoiselle Phlipon was a handsome girl — 
well-nigh a woman. She has no plan or aim but 
knowledge and instruction. " For me happi- 
ness consists in application." " The mornings," 
she writes to Sophie Cannet, " slip away some- 
how in reading and working. After meals I go 
into my little study overlooking the Seine. I 
take a pen, dream, think, and write." Else- 
where she says, *' My violin, my guitar, and 
my pen are three parts of my life." In this way, 
and with a little gardening, the quiet days glide 
on, varied only by a Sunday jaunt to lonely 
Meudon, " with its wild woods and solitary 
pools," or by the rarer visit to friends. 

In this quiet retirement her character is forming 
fast. Doubt begins to trouble her. Her con- 



44 Pour Frenchwomen. 

fessor, somewhat alarmed, hastens to provide 
her with all the apologists of her faith ; from 
these she learns the names of its assailants, and 
procures them too. An endless course I Phi- 
losopher and politician — Voltaire and Diderot, 
Descartes and Malebranche, the System of Na- 
ture and the Treatise on Tolerance — she reads 
them all. She writes, too, CEupres de Loisir and 
Divers Reflections, little tracts on love and lib- 
erty. And as she was Eucharis for Telemachus, 
so with each author she is successively — per- 
haps all at once — Jansenist, Cartesian, Stoic, 
Deist, and Sceptic. 

Rousseau comes at last as the choice dish — 
the peacock's brains — of this mixed entertain- 
ment. Nothing but the Plutarch at nine had 
captivated her like Rousseau at twenty-one. 
She has " found her fitting food," she says. 
" A little Jean-Jacques will last her through the 
night." She stigmatises as " souls of mud " the 
women who can read the Nouvelle Hiloise with- 
out at least wishing to be better. Nor was she 
singular. At every turn of these Revolutionary 
records one traces the influence of the Genevese 
philosopher. Now we do not care much about 
that pseudo-sentiment — for us the windy rhet- 
oric of St. Preux is simply illegible — for us 
Julie d'Etanges is a pricieuse ridicule. If — at 



Madame Roland, 45 

all — we remember that half-crazed genius, that 
self-indulgent, " self-torturing sophist," it is as 
the man who wrote pathetically of paternity, 
and sent his children to the Foundling — as the 
man who took Vitam impendere vero for his 
motto, and " romanced " like Mendez Pinto — 
as the man who allowed his theft of a paltry 
ribbon to ruin a poor girl who loved him, and so 
forth. Yet it is impossible to estimate the ex- 
tent of his power over his contemporaries. This 
opinion of Madame Roland's was the opinion 
of Madame de Stael — of nearly all the world 
in those days ; and to this influence must be 
attributed the somewhat declamatory style of 
the present memoirs ; to it, also, the fact that, 
excellent as they are, they have their undesirable 
pages. 

It is not to be supposed that the handsome 
young bourgeoise, with her natural graces, and 
with talents far above her class, was without ad- 
mirers. " All the youth of the quarter," says 
she pleasantly, and not at all insensibly, "passed 
in review" without success. Her mother, con- 
scious, perhaps, of her approaching end, is anx- 
ious to see her daughter settled. Her father 
wishes to marry her well, from a pecuniary point 
of view, and thinks of little else ; but mademoi- 
selle has her own model of male humanity, and 



46 Four Frenchwomen, 

it is not the neighbouring butcher in his Sunday 
coat and gala lace. " Have I lived with Plu- 
tarch and the philosophers simply to marry a 
tradesman w^ith w^hom I have nothing in com- 
mon ? " Marriage she conceives "to be the 
most intimate union of hearts." Her husband 
must excel her. Nature and the law give him 
the pre-eminence ; she should blush if he did 
not deserve it. Nevertheless she will not be 
commanded. " Ah I " says the quiet mother, 
" you would conquer a man who did your will 
and dreamt it was his own." This is, perhaps, 
the truth. 

She has painted some portraits from that un- 
successful throng. There is Monsieur Mignard, 
" the Spanish Colossus, red-handed as Esau ; " 
Monsieur Mozon, the widower, with the wart on 
his cheek ; the butcher with his lace ; Monsieur 
Morizot de Rozain, who writes d'asse^ belles 
choses, and gets as far as the third explanatory 
letter ; La Blancherie, who has some far-off 
touch of our ideal, upon which we build a deal 
of favour; Gardanne, whom we all but marry; 
and a host who are not placed at all in the race 
for this young lady's hand. 

Every now and then comes papa with " some- 
thing new," as he terms it, and mademoiselle 
sits down to compose, in papa's name, a polite 



Madame Roland, 47 

little refusal in the usual form ; and when at last, 
and not at all in a hurry, arrives Monsieur Ro- 
land de la Platiere, savant and litUrateur — 
lean, bald, and yellow — very grave, very aus- 
tere — " admiring the ancients at the expense 
of the moderns " — who leaves his MSS. in her 
keeping, and who endeavours to enliven a five 
years' courtship by the study of simple equa- 
tions — we are afraid that she married a theory 
and not a husband. 

" Let still the woman take 
An elder than herself : so wears she to him, 
So sways she level in her husband's heart." 

But not twenty years older, surely ? Here, 
at least, the model union was not happy. In 
her scheme of domestic happiness and conjugal 
duties she had ignored one ingredient, and that 
not the least — love. For her own peace of 
mind esteem was not enough. That she de- 
voted herself to Monsieur Roland — that he 
loved her with an ever-increasing affection — 
we have no lack of words to prove ; but we 
have also words to prove that Roland's twenty 
years of seniority and naturally dominant tem- 
perament were at times very irksome to his 
wife. As she perceived this feeling growing 
she became more and more obstinate in her 
*' duty " — no shadow of a name with her. 



48 Four Frenchwomen. 

She carried out her maxim, "that marriage is 
an association of two individuals, in which the 
woman takes charge of the happiness of both," 
to the letter. Her husband, growing gradually 
querulous and infirm, learned to depend on her 
for everything, and she wearied of the thrall. 
Then, too, and last of all, comes the all-absorb- 
ing passion — for another. We are led to sup- 
pose that Roland knew of this. Loving, 
sensitive, he saw that his wife was sacrificing 
herself to him, and he could not bear it. 
"Happiness," she says, '^fied from us. He 
adored me, I gave myself up to him, and we 
were miserable." 

How shall we speak of this terrible love that 
flamed up at last through the philosophic crust 
— that beats and burns in every line of the 
letters to Buzot ? Frankly, we wish they had 
never been discovered. At least, we know 
that she combated it, that she redoubled her 
attention to her husband, and we find her wel- 
coming prison with the prospect of death as the 
only solution of the struggle between her pas- 
sion and her duty. And it is something that 
she honoured the marriage tie in revolutionary 
France, where love was at its lowest, where 
divorce was dangerously easy, and where almost 
every feature by which marriage is accounted 



Monsieur Roland. 



Madame Roland. 49 

honourable was laughed at as the worn-out pre- 
judice of a passed-away regime. " We have 
every reason to believe," says a noble critic, 
" that Madame Roland would have been in- 
dulgent to the frailties of others, yet towards 
herself she remained inexorable, and never once 
admitted the possibility of forsaking her old 
husband, or becoming a faithless wife, save in 
her heart. This inconsistency, so completely 
the reverse of what has been generally pictured, 
may, we think, be counted to such a woman as 
a virtue." 

Did Madame Roland stray as far as the nature 
and extent of her theological and controversial 
studies would lead us to infer ? We scarcely 
think so. Although she confesses to having by 
turns participated in the " exigence of the deist, 
the rigour of the atheist, the insouciance of the 
sceptic," she perhaps holds these opinions no 
longer than she was Eucharis or Erminia. For 
the time being, whatever the creed, she is earn- 
est and sincere. But the early impressions do 
not wear out so easily. She is still moved, 
penetrated by the celebration of divine worship ; 
she still sedulously hears mass if only " for the 
edification of her neighbour." Out of the ma- 
terialist atmosphere of the time, she believes. 
Her hopes instinctively turn heavenward ; it is 

4 



50 Four Frenchwomen, 

only in the study that she doubts. " V esprit a 
beau s'avancer, il ne va jamais aussi loin que le 
cceur.'" Let it be recorded, too, that she never 
fails to raise the simple prayer she quoted, and 
that the last words of her summary ^ words 
carefully expunged by her republican first edi- 
tor — are, " Dieu juste, regois-moi ! " 

We do not propose to attempt her physical 
portrait. Beyond her own written description, 
and the scattered testimonies of contemporaries, 
the fact is that no satisfactory picture exists. 
The painting of Heinsius at Versailles has the 
dark, intelligent eyes, the abundant hair, " tied 
up with blue ribbon," the nose, somewhat large 
at the end '^ qui me faisait quelque peine,'' and 
other material points of resemblance ; but " it 
shows her," says M. Dauban, " in one only of 
her aspects." " Four artists" (this is Cham- 
pagneux, her second editor) "failed to paint 
her ; the fifth effort, which I reproduce here, is 
the happiest ; there is certainly a resemblance, 
but an infinitude of details are lost." " None 
of my portraits," she herself informs us, "give 
any idea of me, except, perhaps, a cameo by 
Langlois." The truth is that the artists drew 
her in repose, and repose was not her strength. 
She had more mind than face, ^' more expression 
than feature," as she puts it. Always eloquent, 



Madame Roland, 51 

when animated she became beautiful, and carried 
everything before her by her fluency, her enthu- 
siasm, the rhythm of her periods, and the beauty 
of her voice. Miss Helena Williams, Lemontey, 
Riouffe, Beugnot, all testify to the charm of 
her conversation. " Camille [Desmoulins] v^as 
right," she says somewhere in the memoirs, *' in 
his surprise that, at my age, and with so little 
beauty, I had what he calls admirers." " I never 
spoke to him." The patient biographer, who 
only sees her dimly through the dust of shaken 
documents, is more unfortunate than the unfor- 
tunate Camille. 

Nor can we hope to do much more than 
vaguely outline her mental portrait. Man by 
the head and woman by the heart, she is appar- 
ently a chapter of antitheses — a changing com- 
pound of sense and sensibility, of reason and 
feeling. Ranging through light and shadow, — 
^' mobile as the air that she breathes ; " now 
forced by politics into hard, unreasoning hatreds, 
now loving with a passion beyond control ; now 
so masculine that we distrust her, now so femi- 
nine that we admire ; naturally graceful, un- 
pleasantly affected ; " Puritan and rigorist with 
overflowing youth and spirit, active and ambi- 
tious with the tastes of an ascetic ; " more 
bourgeoise than patrician, more patrician than 



52 Four Frenchwomen. 

bourgeoise, — the catalogue is one of opposi- 
tions innumerable, of delicate distinctions to be 
marked only by the practised pencil of an 
Arnold or a Sainte-Beuve. 

And yet, with all her war of head and heart, 
with all her fallacies — and those were mostly 
of the time, not hers — she is still a very noble 
woman, albeit nourished " on Logics, Encyclo- 
pMies, and the Gospel according to Jean- 
Jacques." In Carlyle's words, " she shines in 
that black wreck of things like a white Grecian 
statue." Her life is grandly closed by the 
antique dignity of her death. 



III. 

There is an odd fiction current of those days, 
the invention probably of La Harpe, called the 
" Prophecy of Cazotte." In 1788, so runs the 
story, a fashionable company is assembled at 
the house of a great man, a nobleman and acade- 
mician. All talking France is there, laced, 
gallant, and frivolous. To and fro in the crowd 
go the dapper abbes, murmuring mysteriously at 
ladies' ears, like bees at bells of flowers. Very 
polished are the petits-maitres, very radiant the 
marquises. Some one, be-ribboned, with a hand 



Madame Roland. 53 

upon his heart, is quavering out a love-song of 
Aline or Claudine. Here Chamfort, brilliant 
and cynical, is relating a questionable anecdote, 
to cheeks that do not blush, to eyes that do not 
droop. Backwards and forwards the winged 
words flutter, and glitter, and sting. For this 
is the age of wit, of the chasse aux iddes, of facile 
phrases, and of rapid thoughts. History is 
settled forever in the twinkling of a fan ; theology 
is rounded to an epigram ; philosophy is a pretty 
firework with a cascade of sparks. But the all- 
engrossing topic is the " grand and sublime 
revolution " that approaches — the Reign of 
Reason that is to be. 

There is but one among the guests who sits 
apart, — Cazotte, the mystic and Martinist. A 
little scorn is curved about his lips. Perhaps 
he sees farther than the rest. They rally him, 
and he begins to prophesy, amidst peals of 
laughter. " You, Monsieur de Condorcet," 
says he, "will die upon the flags of a prison, 
after having taken poison to cheat the execu- 
tioner. You," and the finger pointed to Cham- 
fort, " will open your veins." All have their 
turns, — Bailly, Malesherbes, Vicq-d'Azyr, and 
the rest. " But the women ? " asks the Duchess 
of Gramont ; "we are lucky, we women, to go 
for nothing in your revolutions." " 'T is not 



54 Pour Frenchwomen, 

that we don't meddle in them, but it seems we 
shall not suffer." '' You are wrong, mesdames," 
returned Cazotte, ^' for this time you will be 
treated like the meny 

It was true. In all the combats, all the expia- 
tions of the Revolution, they had their place. 
In all the clamour of party, and all the solitude 
of captivity, their voices were heard. Most 
nobly, too, they played those painful parts, and 
none more nobly than Madame Roland. " They 
kill us," said Vergniaux of Marie de Corday — 
*' they kill us; but at least they teach us how 
to die." 

Upon the arrest of her husband, Madame 
Roland had risen, almost from a bed of sickness, 
and hurried to the Convention to demand his 
release. But she could see no one : the Con- 
vention was in a state of siege. Outside, the 
court of the Tuileries was swarming with armed 
men ; inside, the hall presented a scene of hope- 
less clamour and confusion. Vergniaux, who 
comes at last, is paralysed and helpless. When, 
after long waiting, she returned home, she found 
that Roland had escaped. At seven the next 
morning she was herself arrested, and taken into 
the Abbaye, where she was placed in the cell 
afterwards occupied by Brissot and Mile, de 
Corday. 



Madame Roland. 55 

She '' took her prison for an hermitage," as 
Lovelace sings. Never, w^e think, w^ere those 
true words so truly realised. She bore the 
whole of her captivity — a durance so vile that 
Beugnot longed for death in preference — al- 
most without a murmur. Only once, and then 
borne down by the miseries of her friends, she 
thought of suicide, when suicides were common. 
As soon as she got within the walls she set her- 
self to conquer her position. Forgetful alike of 
her companions, of her narrow, stifling cage — 
forgetful, too (and this was hard I) of the foul 
lampoons of Hebert, which, by a refinement of 
cruelty, were screeched each day beneath her 
very windows, she buried herself in her books. 
*' I have my Thomson," she writes to Buzot 
from the Abbaye, " Shaftesbury, an English dic- 
tionary, Plutarch, and Tacitus." '^ I have taken 
to drawing again, I read the classics, and I 
am working at my English." Bosc sends her 
flowers from the Jardin des Plantes. With 
these she so enlivens her retreat, that the aston- 
ished gaoler declares he shall call it in future the 
" Pavilion of Flora." At St. Pelagic, to which 
she is soon removed, she is rather better lodged. 
" My cell," she writes again, " is just large 
enough to allow of a chair beside the bed. 
Here, at a tiny table, I read, and draw, and 



56 Four Frenchwomen, 

write." Here, too, she often sits with the con- 
cierge, has even for a time the use of a piano, 
for so do her keepers favour her. And every- 
where her patient serenity wins her friends, 
where friends are rarest, everywhere her quiet 
dignity commands respect. " All the prison 
officials," says Champagneux, " treated her with 
the greatest deference." Her cell is " a temple." 
" Never in his life has he admired her as he 
does now." 

At last she is transferred to the Conciergerie, 
the ante-chamber of the guillotine. Riouife and 
Count Beugnot have both left records of her 
latter days in this, the latest of her prisons. 
" When she arrived," says the former, " without 
being in the prime of life, she was still very 
charming ; she was tall and elegantly shaped ; 
her countenance was very intelligent, but mis- 
fortune and a long confinement had left their 
traces on her face, and softened her natural 
vivacity. Something more than is usually found 
in the looks of women painted itself in those 
large black eyes of hers, full of expression and 
sweetness. She spoke to me often at the grate, 
calling the beheaded Tiventy-iwo ' our friends, 
whom we are so soon to follow.' We were all 
attentive round her in a sort of admiration and 
astonishment ; she expressed herself with a 



Madame Roland, 57 

purity, with a harmony and prosody, that made 
her language like music, of which the ear could 
never have enough." " Her conversation was 
serious, not cold ; coming from the mouth of a 
beautiful woman, it was frank and courageous 
as that of a great man, . . . and yet her servant 
said, ' Before you, she collects her strength ; 
but in her own room she will sit three hours 
sometimes, leaning upon the window, and 
weeping.' " 

All sorts of company met in the Conciergerie. 
Where once the cells held ten, some thirty were 
crammed. The Duchess of Gramont was hustled 
by a pickpocket, sisters of charity were huddled 
with the scum of the Salpetri^re. But here, 
amongst the lowest of the low, the room of 
Madame Roland became an " asylum of peace." 
*' If she descended into the court," says Beug- 
not, "her presence alone restored order; and 
these women, whom no other power controlled, 
were restrained by the fear of her displeasure. 
She gave pecuniary help to the most needy ; to 
all, counsel, consolation, hope." Round her 
they clustered as round a tutelary goddess, while 
they treated the Du Barry- like the worst of 
themselves. When she left they clung about 
her, crying and kissing her hand, "a sight," 
says he again, " beyond description." It was 



58 Four Frenchwomen, 

only an eight days' sojourn that she made, but 
many of the inmates of those dark dungeons 
grieved sincerely when she died. 

The famous Chauveau de la Garde, chivalrous 
to Quixotism, always ready for that dangerous 
honour of disputing his victims to Fouquier-Tin- 
ville, came to offer her his advocacy, but she 
declined it, refusing to peril his head in her de- 
fence. She went to the tribunal wholly dressed 
in white, ^' her long black hair hanging down 
to her girdle." Coming back, she smilingly drew 
her hand over the back of her neck, to signify to 
her fellow-prisoners that she was doomed. She 
had thanked her judges for having thought her 
worthy to share the fate of the great and good 
men they had murdered, " and will try," so she 
says, " to show upon the scaffold as much 
courage as they." 

She did so. At the foot of the guillotine, it 
is said, she asked for pen and paper to write the 
strange thoughts that were rising in her, but her 
request was not granted. Her sole companion 
in the tumbril was a certain Lamarque, an 
assignat-printer. She cheered and consoled 
him — almost brought back his failing courage 
by her easy gaiety. To shorten his suffermg 
she offered to give up to him her right of dying 
first ; but Sanson pleaded adverse orders. 



Madame Roland on the Scaffold. 



Madame Roland. 59 

** Come, you can't refuse the last request of a 
lady," and Sanson yields. As they were buck- 
ling her on the plank her eyes caught sight of 
the great statue of Liberty which stood on the 
Place de la Revolution. " O Liberty, comme 
on fa jouie ! " murmured she. . . . And in the 
cemetery of the Madeleine there is no stone ta 
show where lie the ashes of the Queen of the 
Gironde. ' 

There were two men living at that hour who 
did not long survive the knowledge of her death. 
One, all stunned and shattered, leaves his place 
of refuge, walks out four leagues from Rouen, 
and, sitting down quietly against a tree, passes 
his sword-cane through his heart, dying so 
calmly that he seems, when found next morning, 
" as if asleep." The other, at St. Emilion, 
*' loses his senses for several days."' He, too, 
tracked from place to place, and wandering 
away from his pursuers, is found at last in a 
cornfield near Castillon, half-eaten by the wolves. 
The first of these men was her husband, Roland ; 
the second was her lover, Buzot. 



THE PRINCESS DE LAMBALLE. 
1749-1792. 



" Elle etait aussi bonne quej'oHey 

Memoirs of the Prince de Ligne. 



The Princes se de Lamballe. 



THE PRINCESS DE LAMBALLE. 

I. 

T N one of his Spectator papers Mr. Addison 
-^ has remarked of some of the characters in 
certain heroic poems that they seem to have 
been invented for no other purpose than to be 
killed, and that they are celebrated for nothing 
more than the being knocked on the head with 
a species of distinction. The same may be said 
of many of the Revolutionary heroes and hero- 
ines. They appear to have suddenly started 
from the obscurity of insignificance, or, it may 
be, of self-imposed seclusion, into one luminous 
moment under the guillotine. Of their life, too, 
perhaps " nothing became them like the leaving 
of it." It is difficult, therefore — in many cases 
impossible — to complete their stories. The 
author of the biography which, in the present in- 
stance, constitutes our most important source of 
information, is too skilful and elegant a penman 
to be either dull or tedious, while he is far too 
clever not to endeavour to conceal the slender 
nature of his stock-in-trade. But one cannot 
but feel that his wealth of words smacks some- 



64 Four Frenchwomen, 

what of the questionable hospitality of the Bar- 
mecide ; and it is not easy to avoid remarking 
that his book is not so much the " life " as the 
*' death " of the Princess de Lamballe. M. de 
Lescure's respect has prompted him to raise a 
votive temple where the simple mural record 
would suffice, and we confess ourselves not a 
little impressed by the dexterity with which he 
has expanded his meagre data into a goodly vol- 
ume of nearly five hundred pages. For, in 
truth, the material for a memoir, properly so 
called, does not seem to exist. The present 
specimen commences with the marriage of 
Madame de Lamballe in 1767 : we catch 
glimpses of her between the woods of Rambouil- 
let and the Court of Versailles — now by the 
side of the queen, now by the Duke of Pen- 
thi^vre — until 1791, and we have travelled half 
through our volume. Autobiographical records 
there are none. Her correspondence was small 
— indeed, she does not appear to have been 
imbued with that furor scribendi which was 
characteristic of so many of her contemporaries, 
and the pair of notes her biographer prints have 
no especial individuality beyond a certain bird- 
like, caressing tenderness. There is nothing 
here to plead for her against the insinuation of 
Madame de Genlis that she was not witty, for 



The Princess de Lamballe, 65 

certainly it is nowhere recorded that she ever 
said a quotable thing — nay, she even died with- 
out uttering the bon mot or " last word " which 
appears to have been an historical necessity of 
the times. But she is one of those the very 
silences of whose lives are earnest of their excel- 
lence, one of the good people whose histories 
are unwritten because they were good people. 
Like the Virgilia to whom we have later likened 
her — that Virgilia who, in the whole of Corio- 
lanus, speaks scarcely thirty verses, and yet 
remains, nevertheless, perhaps the most distinctly 
womanly of all Shakspeare's exquisite women — 
she has little need to talk in order to be known. 
We recognise her merit by the few testimonies 
of her contemporaries, by the total absence of 
any authentic accusation, by the " She was as 
good as pretty *' of a man like the Prince de 
Ligne, by the " good angel " of the peasants of 
Penthievre ; and, looking back to Hickel's por- 
trait, a blonde, beautiful head, with the lux- 
uriant hair which once, they say, broke from its 
bands and rippled to her feet — looking back, 
too, not ignorant of the days in which she lived, 
we dare not choose but believe that this delicate 
girlish woman of forty, round whose lips, despite 
the veil of sadness in the eyes, a vague infans 
pudor still lingers like a perfume, was, what 

5 



66 Four Frenchwomen. 

we account her to have been, a very tender, 
loving, and unhappy lady. We shall endeavour, 
with M. de Lescure's assistance, to relate what, 
with any certainty, can be ascertained about 
her. 



II. 



In 1767 the Duke of Penthi^vre, grandson of 
that haughty Athenais de Montespan, who was 
supplanted in the favour of the Grand Monarque 
by the Duchess de Fontanges, had asked Louis 
XV. to choose him a wife for his son, the Prince 
de Lamballe. The king named the Princess of 
Savoy. Communications had passed between 
the courts of France and Sardinia, and the young 
prince^ reassured by a portrait of the lady, had 
lent himself with docility to his father's proposal. 
The contract was forthwith signed, and the 
Princess entered France, arriving on the 30th 
of January at Montereau. Here she was en- 
countered by a gaily-dressed and mysterious 
page " with ardent and inquiring looks," who 
respectfully offered her a magnificent bouquet, 
and in whom she afterwards, with a pleasant 
surprise, recognised her future husband. The 
marriage took place on the same day in the 
chapel of the Chateau de Nangis, the home of 



The Princess de Lamballe. 67 

the Count de Guerchy. On the 5th of Feb- 
ruary she was presented at Versailles, and a 
prompt court poet called attention to the pair in 
a classic duet, where the nymph of the Seine, 
consoling Hymen in his lament upon the de- 
generacy of the age, bids him rejoice at the 
brilliant promises of the union of Marie-Th^rese- 
Louise de Savoie-Carignan and the " son of 
Penthi^vre." 

Was it so happy, this smiling union of seven- 
teen and twenty ? It was not. The prime 
element of fidelity was ignored — "marriage 
was no longer a tie " in the court of Louis XV. 
The Prince de Lamballe was young and ardent, 
branded with the terrible Bourbon temperament, 
freshly emancipated from that over-strict edu- 
cation which foreruns excess, and, if not wicked, 
very weak. What could be anticipated of the 
Telemachus, with a possible Richelieu for 
Mentor, a Chartres or a Lauzun for co-disciple, 
and an easily-conquered Eucharis at the Comedie 
Fran9aise ? Only two months of married life, 
and the absences from the bergerie — as it was 
called — grew sadly frequent, rumours of petit- 
soupers reached Rambouillet, whispers of a 
certain Mile, la Forest, of a certain Mile, la 
Chassaigne. It is Fielding's story over again, 
this one of Marie de Lamballe — a story of short 



6S Four Frenchwomen. 

returns to domesticity, of endless wifely for- 
bearance and womanly forgiveness ; the story of 
Amelia, without the repentance of Booth, and 
with a terrible catastrophe. Only the husband of 
a year, and Louis de Bourbon had run the swift 
course which ends in a disgraceful death. He 
died in 1768, before he was twenty-one. For 
his epitaph we must turn to Bachaumont's 
Memoirs. " The English Gamester,'' says the 
chronicler of Mme. Doublet's nouvelles d la 
main, " was played here yesterday under the 
name of Beverley, a Tragddie Bourgeoise, imi- 
tated from the English. Although the name of 
the Duke of Orleans had been announced the 
day before, it did not appear in the bill, which 
signifies that the prince, in his sorrow, could not 
attend the representation or, at least, was only 
there incognito, on account of the death of the 
Prince de Lamballe." Bachaumont does not 
say in express terms that the duke did go to 
the play — incognito. But, to us, the careless 
frankness of the phrase seems to paint admirably 
the skin-deep delicacy, the cambric-handkerchief 
commiseration of these great gentlemen at Ver- 
sailles, of whom their own journalist can make 
a remark at once so naive and candid. 

The princess, who had nursed her husband 
tenderly in his fatal illness, had pardoned his 



The Princess de Lamhalle, 69 

transgressions and won back his confidence and 
affection, now " sorrowed for him as if he had 
deserved it." The widow of eighteen retired 
to Rambouillet, near Versailles, the seat of her 
father-in-law, the Duke of Penthievre, to whom, 
bereaved of his son and anticipating a separation 
from his daughter. Mile, de Bourbon, she for 
the future consecrated her life. At this time 
she had regained the natural elasticity of her 
spirits, although already subject to the fits of 
melancholy which later became more frequent. 
The woods of Rambouillet rang often to the 
laughter of the two princesses whom the ascetic 
duke, " serious and austere only for himself," 
called laughingly " the pomps of the century." 
To one of them, says his valet Fortaire, he 
would sometimes pleasantly whisper after the 
balls at Passy, ^^ Marie la folk, how many 
quadrilles have you danced to-day ? " 

We could willingly linger, did space permit, 
upon this figure of the charitable Duke of Pen- 
thievre, that contrasts so strongly with the De 
Lignes and Lauzuns of his day; this " bourru 
bienfaisant " and founder of hospitals, who had 
fought at Dettingen and Fontenoy, and who 
lived the life of a Benedictine ; this kindly prac- 
tical castellan of Cr6cy and Sceaux, of whom 
his secretary Florian had written — 



70 Four Frenchwomen, 

** Bourbon n' invite pas les foldtres berg^res 
A s' assembler sous les ormeaux; 
II ne se mile pas d leur danses Itgeres, 
Mais il leur donne des troupeaux; " 

we could willingly recall the legend of this 
"king of the poor "whom the famished royal 
hunt stormed in his solitude at Rambouillet, to 
find him girt with a white apron, flourishing a 
ladle, and preparing the soup of his pensioners ; 
this inconsequent landholder, who salaried the 
poachers on his estate to prevent a recurrence 
of their fault, who hunted for benefactions with 
all the ardour of a sportsman, and who, in 
company with Florian, had cleared the country 
round of paupers, and created a positive dearth 
of wretchedness and misery, and whose known 
charities and virtues had preserved him through 
the worst days of the Terror, to die at last — 
broken by sorrow but strong in faith — in his 
home at Vernon, where the popular memory still 
lovingly cherishes its recollection of the good 
white head and open hand of the old Duke of 
Penthievre. But we have another name at the 
commencement of our paper. 

Madame de Lamballe was suddenly drawn 
from the seclusion of Rambouillet by an intrigue 
which had no less an object than to place her 
upon the throne of France. In 1764 — three 



The Princess de Lamhalle, 71 

years before — the great Queen-courtesan — la 
marraine du rococo — Madame de Pompadour, 
had passed away, painted and powerful even on 
her deathbed^ and her royal master had watched 
her exit with a heartless jest. This was followed, 
in 1765, by the death of the sombre, serious 
dauphin. For a time a qualified decency pre- 
vailed at the court, but when at last, in 1768, the 
quiet queen faded from the half-light of her life 
to the darker obscurity of the grave, all the 
Versailles plotters and panders set eagerly to 
work to provide the king with a successor. 
Two parties formed : the one striving to decoy 
him back to the paths of decency, and to provide 
a worthy successor to the pious Maria Leczinska ; 
the other attempting to attract the degraded and 
irresolute monarch to a new Cotillon III. The 
first, a strong court party, was headed by the 
king's favourite daughter, Madame Adelaide, 
together with the Noailles family (the Duchess 
of Penthi^vre had been a Noailles), and sought 
to advance Madame de Lamballe to the queenly 
dignity ; while the second, led by the king's old 
tempter, Richelieu, and his Chiffinch, the famous 
Lebel, endeavoured to introduce a certain dis- 
reputable Mademoiselle Lange into the royal 
household. The latter attempt was successful ; 
partly, perhaps, because the princess, who seems 



72 Four Frenchwomen, 

to have been a passive and unsolicitous agent in 
the matter, vi^as not calculated, from the very 
sweetness and excellence of her nature, to entice 
the sluggish sensualist w^ho governed France 
back to the self-respect that he had forgotten ; 
partly, again, because the less reputable schemers 
w^ere aided by the opposition of the great min- 
ister Choiseul, v^ho dreaded the ascendency of 
the family of Noailles, and who was, moreover, 
strengthened by the disappointed ambition of 
his sister, Madame de Gramont, who had herself 
— so rumour averred — aspired without success 
to the falling mantle of the Pompadour. Thus 
to the wife of the peculator D' Etioles followed 
a more scandalous successor. Mademoiselle 
Lange began her reign as the Countess Du 
Barry, and the princess went back to her Ram- 
bouillet solitude. 

But Choiseul, although he had secretly op- 
posed the party of Madame Adelaide, would 
not bend to the new favourite, ennobled as she 
was. He had been pliant enough to Madame de 
Pompadour — the clever rohine and art-patroness 
whom Maria Theresa had condescended to 
flatter — but he would not imitate her further 
and treat with this gaming-house syren — this 
impure " Venus sprung from the scum of the 
Parisian deep " — this Countess Du Barry. We 



The Princess de Lamballe, 73 

have no intention of digressing into the web 
of that long intrigue in which the selfish king, 
blinded with luxury, and muttering parrot-like 
on his crumbling throne the temporising Aprds 
moi le dihige which Pompadour had taught him, 
yielded at last to Maupeou and Terrai, and exiled 
his sole capable minister to his home at Chan- 
teloup. But before his exile he had completed 
one negotiation which concerns us, the marriage 
of the dauphin, on the 24th April, 1770, to Marie 
Antoinette, Archduchess of Austria. 

Almost from this date commences the friend- 
ship of Marie Antoinette and Marie de Lamballe. 
The warm-hearted, high-spirited dauphiness, 
seeking for sympathy in the strange formal court 
where so many looked askance, passed by the 
Picquignys, Saint-Megrins, and Coss^s, to find 
in the princess a friend at once equal and tender, 
at once disinterested and devoted ; a favourite 
who asked no favour, except for charity. Hence- 
forth, in all her expeditions to Little Trianon, the 
queen is accompanied by her inseparable com- 
panion ; henceforth, in all these sledge parties, 
which were the delight of the Parisians, peeps 
from fur and swansdown, in its Slavonian toquet 
and heron tuft, the flower-like head of the Prin- 
cess de Lamballe. Begun at the weekly balls of 
the Duchess de Noailles, strengthened by the 



74 Four Frenchwomen, 

princess's newly-revived office of Superintendent 
of the Queen's Household, paling perhaps a little 
before the rising star of the Countess de Po- 
lignac, but knit again by sorrow and tempered 
by tears, the friendship remained the most last- 
ing and characteristic of all the friendships of 
the unhappy queen, a bond to be broken only 
by death. 

MM. de Goncourt, with that happy pen which 
seems to write in colours, have sketched her 
portrait at this period with a felicity of expres- 
sion which we frankly confess ourselves as 
unable to emulate as to translate : — 

'' La Reine, comme toutes les femmes, se dd- 
fendait mal contre ses yeux. La figure et la iour- 
nure riitaient pas sans la toucher, et les portraits 
que nous sont restds de Madame de Lamhalle 
disent la premibre raison de sa faveur. La plus 
grand beautd de Madame de Lamhalle, dtait la 
s6r6nit6 de sa ph/sionomie. Uiclair mime de 
ses yeux dtait tranquille. Malgri les secousses et 
la fidvre d'une maladie nerveuse, il n'/ avail pas 
un pli, pas une nuage sur son beau front, battu de 
ces longs cheveux blonds qui boucleront encore 
autour de la pique de Septemhre. Italienne, Ma- 
dame de Lamhalle avail les graces du Nord, et 
elle n^itait jamais plus belle qu^en traineau, sous 
la martre et Vhermine, le teint fouetti par un vent 



The Princess de Lamballe, 75 

d& neige, on bien encore lorsque, dans Vombre 
d'un grand chapeau de paille, dans un nuage de 
linon, elle passait comme un de ces rives dont le 
peintre anglais Lawrence promdne la robe blanche 
sur les verdures mouilUesy 

So much for her physical portrait in 1775- 
With regard to the moral aspect, we shall speak 
— faithfully reproducing contemporary judg- 
ments wherever they can be given without reser- 
vation or comment — in the words of the Baronne 
d'Oberkirch, as quoted by M. de Lescure : — 
"She is a model," says this lady, "of all the 
virtues, and especially of filial piety to the father 
of her unfortunate husband, and of devoted af- 
fection to the queen. . . . Her character is gay 
and naive, and she is not perhaps very witty. 
She avoids argument, and yields immediately 
rather than dispute. She is a sweet, good, ami- 
able woman, incapable of an evil thought, bene- 
volence and virtue personified, and calumny has 
never made the slightest attempt to attack her. 
She gives immensely — more, indeed, than she 
can, and even to the point of inconveniencing 
herself, for which reason they call her ' the 
good angel' in the lands of Penthievre." 

We see her now — as clearly as we shall. 
We know this delicate lady with the bouche mig- 
nonne, and beautiful eyes, this good angel of 



76 Four Frenchwomen. 

Sceaux and Rambouillet, this alternate Allegro 
and Penseroso of the landscapes of Le N6tre, 
this queen's friend, " who only sought credit in 
order to be useful^ and favour in order to be 
loved." 

Charitable and pious, gentle and lovable, she 
stands before us like a realisation of the noble 
old motto of devotion — Tender and True. 



III. 

The eighteenth century, tow^ards its latter por- 
tion especially, has one marked and curious 
feature — that of credulity. " Its philosophers," 
says Louis Blanc, " had overworked analysis. 
They had over-sacrificed sentiment to reason 
— the happiness of belief to the pride of sci- 
ence. The intellect, keeping solitary watch in 
the silence of the other faculties, grows wearied 
and timorous ; it ends by doubting everything — 
by doubting even itself, and seeks oblivion at 
last in the illusions of imagination. Faith 
rests from thought, and the repose v^ould differ 
but little from death were it not that the sleep is 
filled with dreams. . . . Thus after Voltaire a 
reaction was inevitable, and the besoin de croire, 
disconcerted but unconquered, reappeared in 
fantastic forms." 



The Princess de Lamballe. 77 

^' Populus vult declpi ; decipiatur." The de- 
mand for miracles was speedily followed by the 
supply of prophets. After the sober, slow-pro- 
gressing car of science there suddenly appeared 
another equipage, flaunting and noisy, with a 
jingling jack-pudding, and a steeple-hatted, spec- 
tacled practitioner — the chariot of the quack. 
Next to Voltaire and Diderot, Condorcet and 
D'Alembert, came Dulcamara, vaunting his phil- 
tres and elixirs, his hypo-drops and his electu- 
aries, holding the keys of the Future, and 
discovering the secrets of Life and of Death. 
The Parisians, enervated and febrile, greedy 
of novelty, cut from their beliefs, and drifting 
they knew not whither, caught eagerly at the 
promises of every charlatan, when charlatans 
abounded. They cherished and credited the 
impudent sharper and picaresque Don Juan — 
Casanova. They believed in the ChepalUre 
D'Eon de Beaumont, who persuaded them that 
he was man or woman as he pleased. They 
flocked to the Count de St. Germain, who had 
lived for several centuries, who declared that he 
had been intimate with Francis the First, and 
that he had known Our Lord. They flocked 
to the mountebank Giuseppe Balsamo, who flu- 
ently informed them that he was born in the 
middle of the Red Sea ; that he had been 



78 Four Frenchwomen. 

brought up among the Pyramids, and that there 
— abandoned by his parents — he had learned 
everything from a wonderful old man who had 
befriended him. They flocked to the salle des 
crises of Mesmer and D'Eslon ; they flocked to 
the magnetised elms of the Marquis de Puyse- 
gur. They crowded the meetings of masonic 
lodges, and listened eagerly to the obscure elo- 
quence of Saint Martin, the mystic doctrines of 
Adam Weishaupt. Everywhere the quacks mul- 
tiplied and the dupes increased, the prophets 
prophesied and the miracles abounded : the 
Parisians wished to be deceived, and were 
deceived. 

From this blindness of her century Madame 
de Lamballe was not wholly exempt. But we 
may fairly assume that she sought neither to 
alleviate an unsound mental activity nor to sat- 
isfy a prurient craving after the supernatural. 
If, as is reported, she had been found at the 
stances of D'Eslon, she visited the " enchanted 
vat " only with the vain hope of obtaining relief 
from the nervous malady for which she had so 
long desired a remedy. If, again, she was per- 
suaded to become a masoness, we are expressly 
told that she had been taught to see in such a 
step only a means of furthering the ends of 
charity ; for at that time, as remarks one of her 



The Princess de Lamhalle, 79 

reviewers, justice, honour, tolerance, and lib- 
erty were in all mouths. " It was a very deli- 
rium of benevolence and hope," And it was 
not easy to detect, through the philanthropic 
jargon, the fanciful rites and seeming harmless 
festivals of the secret societies, those silent and 
pertinacious powers that were slowly sapping 
the bases of things. It would have been hard 
to believe — in 1781 — that the Utopian banquets 
of the lodges, with their " good wine and bad 
verse," could cover the laboratories and asylums 
for nearly all the indefinite ambitions — all the 
unquiet yearnings of the times. Even the king 
himself, whose timorous instincts led him to dis- 
trust private meetings, was reassured by the prin- 
cess's accounts of these harmless associations, 
that dispensed pensions to the clinking of 
glasses, and numbered among their members 
all the greatest nobles of the court. It is clear, 
too, that the queen, like Madame de Lamballe, 
saw in that sealed masonic mystery, from which 
issued at last, as from the fisherman's jar in the 
Arabian tale, one of the most terrible genii of 
the Revolution, nothing more than an eccentric 
institution for the practice of philanthropy. Yet 
for all this, as M. de Lescure affirms, it was here 
that the affair of the ^' Necklace " had its birth 
and its elaboration. It was here, too, that many 



8o Four Frenchwomen, 

a sleepless French Casca sharpened in the se- 
curity of secrecy the daggers of '93. These 
lively bacchic " Rondes de Tables,'' with their 
*' amiable sisters" and assiduous "brothers," 
their Virtues and their Graces, Cythera and 
Paphos, were, after all, but the lighter preludes 
to the Carillon National and the sanguinary 
Carmagnole. 

With the exception of her appointment as 
Superintendent of the Queen's Household, her 
affiliation to freemasonry appears to have been 
the most important occurrence in the life of 
Madame de Lamballe up to 1785 — the most 
important, of course, of those which have been 
recorded. In 1777 she had been admitted into 
the Loge de la Candeur, and in 1781 she ac- 
cepted the dignity of grand mistress of the 
Mdre Loge Ecossaise d' Adoption. We shall 
not reproduce the mediocre but complimentary 
verses which were chanted to the fair assembly 
on that occasion by their devoted brother and 
secretary^ M. Robineau de Beaunoir. In 1778 
she lost both parents ; and in the December of 
the same year, just after her father's death, we 
find her by the queen's bedside at the birth of 
the future Madame Royale — "the poor little 
one not the less dear for being undesired." 

In 1 78 1 the Mdre Loge Ecossaise distin- 



The Princess de Lamballe. 8i 

guished itself by great manifestations of charity 
in honour of the birth of the much-desired dau- 
phin. " I have read with interest," writes the 
queen in November to the princess, who was 
nursing the old Duke of Penthievre, " what has 
been done in the masonic lodges over which you 
presided at the commencement of the year, and 
about which you amused me so. ... I see 
that they do not only sing pretty songs, but that 
they also do good. Your lodges have followed 
in our footsteps by delivering prisoners and mar- 
rying young women." Early in the succeeding 
year we find Madame de Lamballe by the side 
of Madame Adelaide, at the banquet given by 
the city of Paris to the king in celebration of the 
same event, when there was placed before the 
company a Rhine carp which had cost 4,000 
francs, and which his majesty had the bad taste 
to disapprove of. We catch a glimpse of her 
under the girandoles of Versailles at the ball 
given to the Russian grand duke (afterwards 
Paul I.) and his duchess ; and again '^en 
costume de batelUre de Vile d' Amour, ^^ at the 
Chantilly fetes arranged by the Prince de Cond^ 
in honour of the same illustrious personages. 

But despite the affluence of words with which 
her biographer has surrounded his subject, the 
record of her life during this period has little 

6 



82 Four Frenchwomen, 

more than the barren precision of a court cir- 
cular. During all this time, M. de Lescure 
assures us, she was actively charitable, but her 
personal history is of the kind of which it has 
been cleverly said, " Nous entrevofonSj nous ne 
voyons pas." 

From its commencement to 1778, the friend- 
ship of Madame de Lamballe and the queen had 
been cloudless. After this, for reasons which 
have remained obscure, but which are possibly 
referable to the rising favour of the Countess 
Jules de Polignac, it had slightly languished. 
But in 1785 it revived again never to be inter- 
rupted except by death. In 1785 the queen had 
sore need of such an aid. The shades were 
thickening round the throne, and she stood al- 
most alone. She had lost her ally and adviser, 
Choiseul. Her court had thinned to a little 
circle of friends. Outside, the people hated 
her, and made the Autrichlenne responsible for' 
every popular misfortune. Outside, the whole 
kennel of libellers and chronicle-makers, ballad- 
mongers and pamphleteers, were in full cry. 
She was upon the eve of that great scandal of 
the " Necklace ; " she was to be shaken by the 
death of the Princess Beatrice — she was to be 
shaken by the death of the dauphin. One can 
comprehend how readily, with such a dismal 



The Princess de Lamballe. 83 

present and such a darkling future, she turned 
to the friend " who had retired without a mur- 
mur, and who returned without complaint. 
' Never believe,' she said to her, ' that it will 
be possible for me not to love you — it is a habit 
of which my heart has need.'" 

From 1786 to 1789, nevertheless, the life is 
again barren of incident. In the middle of 1787 
— if we may believe a letter of Horace Wal- 
pole — she paid a visit to England. In May, 
1789, she assisted at the opening of the States 
General, and during the whole of that year 
seems to have been engaged, on behalf of 
Marie Antoinette, in negotiations which had 
for their object the conciliation of the Orleans 
party. On the 7th of October she learned 
at the Chateau d'Eu, where she was staying 
with the Duke of Penthi^vre, of the transfer 
of the royal family to the Tuileries. On the 
8th she joined the queen. 

The great event of 1791 is the unsuccessful 
flight to Varennes. Simultaneously with the 
escape of the royal fugitives the princess left 
the Tuileries and sailed from Boulogne, in all 
probability direct to England. That she came 
to this country at this time there appears to 
be no doubt. In one of the little notes printed 
by M. de Lescure in facsimile, with its ^^ pattes 



84 Four Frenchwomen. 

de mouches " handwriting, she speaks of being 
about to visit Blenheim, Oxford, and Bath, and 
makes great fun of an English lady whom she 
had heard that morning reading Nina at Brigh- 
ton. Peltier, too, writing his Dernier Tableau 
here in 1792-93, speaks of her having been at 
London and Bath after the Varennes affair. 

The prime motive of her visit, her biographer 
supposes, was to obtain the protection of the 
English government for the royal family. The 
queen had already sent a messenger — possibly 
messengers — with this view, but, according to 
Madame Campan, without any better result 
than the unsatisfactory declaration of Mr. Pitt, 
that " he would not allow the French monarchy 
to perish." The office of secret ambassadress 
was now intrusted to Madame de Lamballe. 
" The fact results," says M. de Lescure, 
'' from the following passage of a letter of the 
queen [to her sister, Marie Christine, Duchess 
of Saxe Teschen, September, 1791], which ac- 
quaints us, sadly enough, with the results which 
she obtained," and from which we quote the fol- 
lowing lines : — " The queen and her daughters 
received her favourably, but the king's reason is 
gone. [La raison du Rot est ^garde.] It is the 
Chancellor of the Exchequer who governs, and 
he said cruelly, and almost in express terms to 



The Princess de Lamhalle, 85 

the princess, that we had brought our misfortune 
on ourselves." 

The passage, no doubt, is explicit. But, curi- 
ously enough, this very passage is one of those 
which were selected to prove the untrustworthy 
nature of the collection of Marie Antoinette's 
letters published by Count Paul d'Hunolstein. 
We had indeed been struck some months ago by 
the singular way in which the queen speaks of 
Pitt, but we can lay no claim to the discovery 
of anything else. A writer in the Edinburgh 
Review for April, 1865, in an examination of the 
correspondence, points out the several blunders 
into which the concoctor (for we must assume 
it so) of the letter meddling with this, to him, 
terra incognita of England, has necessarily 
fallen. They are, shortly, as follows : — First 
and foremost, George III. was not out of his 
mind at this time. He was taken ill in October, 
1788 ; resumed government in March, 1789 ; 
had no return of his malady for several years, 
and was certainly in full possession of his fac- 
ulties in August, 1 79 1. Secondly, the queen, 
who must have known better, would hardly have 
called Pitt the Chancellor of the Exchequer, for, 
although he held the office, he was known by his 
other title of First Lord of the Treasury ; and 
thirdly, it is improbable that he would have 



86 Four Frenchwomen, 

spoken so harshly and discourteously to a mem- 
ber of that royal family for whom his interven- 
tion was requested. Other proofs follow of the 
neutral attitude of England, and of the fact that 
Marie Antoinette had at the time sources of 
communication with this country besides Ma- 
dame de Lamballe. The first of these reasons 
is certainly the best. It might indeed be possi- 
ble for the queen to have made the second mis- 
take, and possibly Pitt's curt answer might have 
become "almost in express terms" unfeeling 
and discourteous after passing through two 
ladies who dreaded and disliked him — one so 
much that she " could never pronounce his 
name without a shiver." Combined in some 
five lines, however, they have a singularly apoc- 
ryphal appearance, and, all things considered, 
the passage as a pibce justificative of the ob- 
ject of Madame de Lamballe's visit, and what 
her biographer calls " her attempts to tame and 
soothe the surly selfishness of English policy," 
can scarcely be held to be convincing. 

M. de Lescure has striven, with all the elo- 
quence of enthusiasm, to impress upon us the 
transformation that affection now wrought in the 
modest and retiring princess. He would have 
her to have become an active diplomatist — a 
delicate feminine Machiavel, "a modest Iris," 



The Princess de Lamhalle, Sy 

yielding only to fearful disadvantage. A propos 
of the before-mentioned Orleans negotiation, he 
enlarges upon this idea ; and again d propos of 
the English mission, he calls upon us to admire 
the " sang-froid " of the " discrete,'' the " ins'in- 
uante,'' and the " touchanie Lamballe,'" as she 
*' grapples with the distrustful oppositions of 
English egoism." But the hard historical Grad- 
grind cries for facts. Our author allows that 
details are wanting for the first attempt, while 
the picturesque diplomatic attitude of the princess 
in England seems to repose entirely upon the 
foregoing doubtful extract from the letter of the 
queen. That she interested herself to the best 
of her ability for the friends she had left in so 
strange and sad a strait, and the Marats and 
Gorsas and Frerons gave her every credit for 
her efforts, is natural ; but we like better to 
think that it was not her metier — that, to use 
Mr. Carlyle's forcible words, " the piping of the 
small silver voice " was ineffectual "• in the black 
world-tornado." To a Frenchman it may seem 
painful that she had not the conspicuous excel- 
lence of Frenchwomen or Italians. We like 
her better so. We like her best restless and 
pining in her English exile, longing to " throw 
herself into the tiger's jaws " — to " die by the 
side of the queen." 



88 Four Frenchwomen, 

The queen, however, did not wish her to re- 
turn. Letter after letter reiterated this desire — 
now as a command, now as an entreaty. " I 
know well that you love me, and I have no need 
of this new proof. Quelle bonheur que d'etre 
aimde pour soi-mime ! . . . In the new misfor- 
tunes that overwhelm me it is a consolation to 
know that those one loves are in safety. . . . 
Don't come back, my dear Lamballe," the letters 
repeat. ... "I can only tell you not to come 
back ; things are too dreadful, but I have cour- 
age for myself, and I don't know whether I 
could have it for my friends — such a one as 
yourself, above all. . . . No, once more I say 
don't come back ; don't throw yourself into the 
tiger's jaws." " Remain where you are," writes 
the king ; "we shall meet at a future time with 
greater pleasure. Wait for a little time." But 
it was no longer possible for the princess to stay 
away. " The queen needs me, and I must live 
or die at her side," she said. In October she 
made her will at Aix-la-Chapelle — a will in 
which even her dogs were not forgotten — and 
in November she re-entered France. 



The Princess de Lamballe. 89 



IV. 

" I COMMEND the attachment of my daughter- 
in-law to the queen," said the old duke to his 
valet Fortaire ; '' she has made a very great 
sacrifice in returning to her, and I fear she will 
suffer for it." He was to see her again but 
once. She left him in November to rejoin the 
royal family at the Tuileries ; she returned to him 
for a few days in the May following, but from 
that time her life is bound and mingled with her 
friend's. The Countess de Polignac had yielded 
to the queen's request and fled. The Abbe de 
Vermond was gone. The fair-weather Lauzuns 
and Besenvals were gone — long ago. But the 
nervous, delicate princess rose to the necessity 
with an intrepidity of affection wonderful in one 
so frail. " I went often to visit her," says 
Madame de la Rochejaquelein ; " I saw all her 
anxieties, all her troubles ; there was never any 
one more courageously devoted to the queen. 
She had made sacrifice of her life. Just before 
the loth of August she said to me, ' The more 
danger increases, the stronger I feel. I am 
quite ready to die — I fear nothing.' " , . . " The 
good Lamballe," wrote the queen to Madame 



90 Four Frenchwomen. 

de Polignac, '* seemed only to wait for danger 
to show us all her worth." 

When at the second attack upon the Tuileries, 
in June, 1792, the queen sought to follow the 
king, whom the National Guard Aclocque had 
persuaded to show himself to the people, it is 
Madame de Lamballe who whispers, " Madame, 
your place is by your children." When, again, 
the crowd, with a smashing of doors and furni- 
ture, surged into the council-room where a 
handful of guards had barricaded the little group 
with the great table, behind which the pale queen, 
with Madame Royale pressed t5 one side, and 
the wide-eyed wondering dauphin on the other, 
stands unmoved by scurrilous words and threat- 
ening knives, Madame de Lamballe is closest of 
all the " courtiers of misfortune." It is Madame 
de Lamballe again, who, in this Pavilion de Flore 
of the Tuileries which she gaily styles " her dun- 
geon," charges herself with that difficult duty of 
sifting and sorting the spirits round the royal 
family, of retaining only the devoted followers, 
and removing doubtful or lukewarm adherents 
from a palace where the best qualification for 
servitude was the willingness to die. It is 
Madame de Lamballe, again, who passes, tear- 
ful and terrified, on M. de la Rochefoucauld's 
arm between the files of grenadiers conducting 



Marie Antoinette and her Children. 



ViW\ 



The Princess de Lamballe, 91 

the king to that insecure refuge of the Assembly. 
She is with them through all that long day in the 
ten-foot oven of the Logotach/graphe, at the 
close of which the queen, asking for a handker- 
chief, cannot obtain one unsprinkled with blood. 
" We shall come back," Marie Antoinette had 
said that morning, consoling her trembling wo- 
men. But Madame de Lamballe had no such 
hope when she told her escort that they should 
never see the Tuileries again. She is with them 
in the cells of the Feuillans Convent ; she ac- 
companies them to the Prison of the Temple. 

Mesdames St., Brice, Thibaut, and Bazire, 
ladies-in-waiting to the queen, Madame la Mar- 
quise de Tourzel, and Pauline her daughter, 
governesses to the royal children, and MM. Hue 
and Chamilly, made up the little group of faith- 
ful servants who still clung to royalty in disgrace. 
It was the middle of August, and the heat was 
excessive. Garments of every kind were want- 
ing to the prisoners, not yet, indeed, acknowl- 
edged to be such, but treated with a strange 
mingling of insolence and consideration which 
betokened the disordered state of those about 
them. In the hastily-prepared apartments of 
the Feuillans — their nightly prison during their 
detention by the Assembly — the king had slept 
with a napkin round his head for a nightcap. 



92 Four Frenchwomen, 

He now wore the coat of an officer of the Cent- 
Suisses, while the dauphin was dressed in clothes 
belonging to the son of the Countess of Suther- 
land. Once in the Temple, various communi- 
cations with the outer world became necessary, 
in order to procure changes of dress. All sorts 
of suspicions were aroused by this proceeding. 
*' They murmured greatly against the women 
who had followed us," says Madame Royale. 
An order from the Commune arrived to separate 
the prisoners ; but the Procureur-G^n^ral de la 
Commune, Manuel, touched by the queen's 
grief, suspended it for a time. The pretext of 
this dangerous correspondence with outsiders 
proved, however, too desirable to be passed 
over, and at midnight on the 19th of August an 
order arrived to remove from the Temple all 
persons not belonging to the royal family. The 
queen vainly objected that the princess was her 
relation ; the order was carried into effect, and 
the ladies were removed. After the separation 
"we all four remained unable to sleep," says 
Madame, simply. The municipals had assured 
them, that the ladies would be sent back after 
examination ; the next day, at seven, they were 
informed that they had been transferred to the 
prison of the Little Force. Only M. Hue, re- 
turned for a sort time to the Temple. 



The Princess de Lamhalle. 93 

Madame de Lamballe, Madame de Tourzel, 
and her daughter, were taken to the Commune, 
where they were examined. At twelve they 
were taken to the Force, and separated ; but 
they were afterwards united by the intervention 
of Manuel. Already the fate of the princess 
seems to have been decided, for her name was 
underlined in the prison register. 

Meanwhile the inmates of the Temple had 
not forgotten them. The queen herself, on 
hearing from Manuel of their detention, had 
busied herself to pack them up clothes and 
necessaries. " The next morning," says Pauline 
de Tourzel, " we received a packet from the 
Temple ; it contained our effects, which the 
queen had forwarded. She herself, with that 
goodness which never failed, had taken care to 
collect them. . . . The inconvenience of our 
lodging, the horror of the prison, the pain of 
separation from the king and his family, the 
severity with which this separation seemed to 
imply we should be treated, all these things to- 
gether depressed me greatly, I confess, and ex- 
tremely terrified the unfortunate princess." 

We pass to the commencement of September. 
It is not here the place to tell the story of the 
terrible hundred hours during which the Parisian 
mob, in an agony of rage and fear — fear of the 



94 Pour Frenchwomen, 

Prussian at Verdun, fear of the plotter in the 
city — massacred in a systematic butchery, 
winked at or organised by the Commune, no 
less than fourteen hundred and eighty persons 
in the prisons of Paris. On the 2d of Septem- 
ber, at breakfast time, our captives had been 
told that " passions had been fermenting in Paris 
since the preceding evening ; that massacres were 
apprehended, that the prisons were threatened, 
and that several were already forced." Towards 
midnight on the same day commenced the mas- 
sacres at La Force. 

The proceedings, it is known, were not con- 
ducted without a certain parade, or rather parody, 
of reason and justice. La Force, in particular, 
had a complete " tribunal of the people " sitting 
in the room of the concierge, and having a presi- 
dent (changed frequently during the four days' 
sitting), six or seven judges (for the most part 
emissaries of the Commune), and a public 
accuser. Before these the prisoner appeared, 
was hurriedly examined, and speedily judged. 
If accounted guilty the sentence ran, " Let the 
accused be discharged," or, with a curious irony, 
he was dismissed d rAbbaye, or d Coblent^, and 
uncertain of his fate, was pushed through the 
wicket, and behind the wicket were the butchers. 
If, on the other hand, he was absolved — a rare 



The Princess de Lamhalle. 95 

exception — the formula was, " Let him l)e dis- 
charged, with Vive la nation;^'' he was dragged 
upon a pile of corpses, " the worthy altar of 
Fraternity," and obliged, amidst shouts and 
cheers, to swear the civic oath. 

Pauline de Tourzel had been separated from 
her mother some hours before, and saved. The 
other two prisoners remained in a terrible sus- 
pense, awaiting the death of which there seemed 
but little doubt. They were fetched at last, and 
taken down into a little court filled by a number 
of fierce-looking men, the greater number of 
whom were drunk. Madame de Tourzel was 
called to the assistance of a fainting lady, and 
afterwards led to the tribunal. She was exam- 
ined for a few minutes, then hurried through the 
wicket, just catching sight of the pile of corpses 
which choked the little street, and upon which 
stood two men with dripping sabres, and 
smuggled away to rejoin her daughter. In the 
meantime, Madame de Lamballe had been trans- 
ferred to the adjoining prison of the Greater 
Force. 

It is not easy to decide whether this step was 
taken in the hope of saving her, or whether it 
was intended to secure her thus more surely to 
the vengeance of her assassins. Mesdames de 
Tourzel were certainly preserved by emissaries 



96 Four Frenchwomen, 

from the Commune. Was the princess included 
in the same intention ? The Duke of Penthi^vre, 
we know, was making every effort. Looking 
to the result, we are forced to believe that 
her death had been decided. We pass, how- 
ever, from surmises to history, and take up her 
story as told by the royalist journalist, Peltier. 
''This unfortunate princess," says he, " having 
been spared [?] on the night of the 2d, had 
thrown herself upon her bed, a prey to all kinds 
of horrors and anxieties. She closed her eyes 
only to open them almost immediately, starting 
from sleep at some dreadful dream. About 
eight o'clock in the morning two national guards 
entered her room, to announce to her that she 
was about to be transferred to the Abbaye. To 
this she replied that, prison for prison, she would 
as soon remain where she was as remove to 
another, and consequently refused to come 
down, begging them very earnestly to let 
her be. 

'' One of the guards thereupon approached, 
and said to her harshly that she must obey, for 
her life depended upon it. She replied that she 
would do what they desired, and begging those 
in her room to retire, put on a gown, recalled 
the national guard, who gave her his arm, and 
went down to the formidable wicket, where she 



The Princess de Lamhalle. 97 

found, invested with their scarves, the two muni- 
cipal officers who were then occupied in judging 
the prisoners." , . . They were H6bert and 
THuilUer. Arrived before this implacable tri- 
bunal, the sight of the dripping weapons — of 
the butchers, whose hands, faces, and clothes 
were stained with blood — the shrieks of the 
wretches who were being murdered in the 
street, so overcame her that she fainted repeat- 
edly. No sooner was she revived by the care 
of her waiting-woman than she lost conscious- 
ness again. When at last she was in a state to 
be questioned, they made semblance of com- 
mencing the interrogatory. This, in few words, 
was her examination, as gathered by the family 
of the princess from the report of an ocular 
witness : — 

" Who are you ?" » 

*' Marie- Louise, Princess of Savoy." 

'' Your capacity ? " 

" Superintendent of the Queen's Household." 

" Had you knowledge of the plots of the court 
on the tenth of August ? " 

" I do not know if there were any plots on 
the tenth of August, but I know that I had no 
knowledge of them." 

" Swear liberty, equality, hatred of the King, 
of the Queen, and of royalty." 

7 



98 Four Frenchwomen. 

*' I will willingly swear the first two ; I can- 
not swear the last : it is not in my heart." (Here 
an assistant whispered, "Swear, then: if you 
don't swear, you are lost.") The princess did 
not answer, lifted her hands to her face, and 
made a step towards the wicket. The judge 
then said, " Let madame be discharged " (C^u on 
^largisse madame). The phrase, as we know, 
was the signal of death. A report has been cir- 
culated that it was not the intention of the judge 
to send her to execution, but those who wished 
by this to extenuate the horror of her death 
have forgotten what precautions were taken to 
save her. Some say that when the wicket was 
opened she had been recommended to cry " Vive 
la nation ! " but that, terrified at the sight of 
the blood and corpses that met her eye, she 
could only answer " Fi /' horreur !'' and that 
the assassins, applying the very natural excla- 
mation to the cry they demanded of her, had 
struck her down there and then. Others affirm 
that at the door of the wicket she only uttered 
the words " Je suis perdue.'' 

But, however this may be, she had no sooner 
crossed the threshold than she was struck. " Just 
at this moment," continues another narrator, who 
adds some slight details to the foregoing account 
of Peltier, which, nevertheless, seems to have 



The Prison La Force. 



The Princess de Lamhalle, 99 

served him as a basis — " just at this moment 
one of the ruffians around her attempted to lift 
her headdress with his sabre, but as he lurched, 
drunk, and half-dazed with blood, the point cut 
her over the eye. The blood gushed out, and 
her long hair fell upon her shoulders. Two men 
held her up tightly below the armpits, and 
obliged her to walk upon the bodies. ... A 
few cries of ' Grace ! Grdce ! ' were raised by a 
handful of the spectators posted in the street, 
but one of the butchers, crying ' death to the 
disguised lacqueys of the Duke of Penthievre 1 ' 
fell upon them with his sabre. Two were killed 
outright, the rest found safety in flight. Almost 
at the same instant another of the wretches, with 
the blow of a club, struck down the princess — 
senseless between the men who held her up — 
upon the heap of corpses at his feet." Her 
head was then cut off, and the headsman, 
" accompanied by some of his fellows, carried 
it to the counter of a neighbouring marchand de 
vin, whom they tried to force into drinking 
its health. The man refusing was maltreated, 
dragged upon a heap of bodies, and com- 
pelled, with the knife at his throat, to cry 
' Vive la nation ! ' " When he returned home 
his shop was empty ; the mob had carried ofif 
everything. 



100 Four Frenchwomen, 

We have neither intention nor inclination to 
detail the further atrocities to which the body 
was subjected. It is sufficient to say that 
towards mid-day the mob resolved to carry the 
head in triumph. Having forced a hairdresser 
to comb, curl, and powder it, in order that the 
AiUrichienne might recognise the face, they lifted 
it upon a pike, formed into a procession with 
drums and fifes, headed by a boy and an old man 
dancing like maniacs, and accompanied by a 
gathering crowd of men, women, and children — 
ragged, blood-stained, and drunken — shrieking 
at intervals ^^ Lamballe ! Lamballe ! '' and pil- 
laging the wine-shops as they went, they bore 
their trophy through the streets of Paris — Paris 
that looked on, inactive and in stupor, during 
the whole of these four days of infamy and 
carnage. 

History and romance are strangely mingled in 
the story of this horrible procession. It seems 
clear, however, that they carried the head first to 
the Abbey St. Antoine, the abbess of which, 
Madame de Beauvau, had been a friend of 
Madame de Lamballe. They then — and this 
is certain — took it to the Temple to exhibit it 
to Marie Antoinette. The sight — though not 
the knowledge — was spared the queen by those 
about her ; but the king's valet, Clery, saw it 



The Princess de Lamhalle, loi 

* bloody, but not disfigured, with the fair hair 
curling yet, and floating round the pike-shaft," 
as it tossed to and fro above the cruel faces and 
upturned eyeballs of the crowd who filled the 
trampled Temple garden, and yelled for Madame 
Veto. It is certain, too, that it was borne as a 
grim homage to Philip EgaliU, who was just 
sitting down to dinner in the Palais Royal, 
where shameless Madame de Buffon fell back- 
ward, shrieking from her chair, her face covered 
with her hands, ^' Ah, mon Dieu ! ma tete se 
promenera un jour de cette manUre ! " Where 
else and with what other incidents until at last 
it was conveyed away by the emissaries of the 
Duke de Penthi^vre to the Cemetery of the 
Foundlings, cannot further with any accuracy 
be related. Of the life of Madame de Lamballe 
our readers know all that we can tell them, and 
we have added nothing to the horror of her 
death. 

Not a grand death, we hasten to add, by any 
means. Not dramatic, for example, in a white 
dress parsemie de bouquets de couleur rose, with 
longings for pen and ink to chronicle her feelings. 
Not an august progress through a rancorous 
mob, in a scarlet shirt, like " Vengeance sanc- 
tified." She has left us no political apologia, 
no address to the French people, with a ring of 



102 Four Frenchwomen, 

*' Quousque tandem'' in it by which we are to 
remember her ; no eloquent appeal to an im- 
partial posterity by which we are to judge her. 
Yet judge her harshly we shall not — remember 
her we shall most certainly as one who was 
" aussi bonne que jolie ; " as " the good Lamballe, 
who only needed danger to show us all her 
worth ; " as a genuine woman and ill-fated lady, 
who was as lovable as Virgilia, as pure as 
Imogen, and as gentle as Desdemona. " She 
was beautiful, she was good, she had known no 
happiness/' says Carlyle. Shall we not pity her ? 
Pious where piety was useless, except as the 
cloak to hide an interest ; chaste in a court of 
rouds and panders, where chastity was a " pre- 
judice ; " a tender wife, a loving daughter, and 
a loyal friend, — shall we not here lay down 
upon the grave of Marie de Lamballe our rever- 
ential tribute, our little chaplet of immortelles, in 
the name of all good women, wives, and 
daughters ? 

" Elle itait mieux femme que les autres.^' To 
us that apparently indefinite, exquisitely definite 
sentence most fitly marks the distinction between 
the subjects of the two preceeding papers and 
the subject of the present. It is a transition 
from the stately sitting figure of a marble Agrip- 



The Princess de Lamhalle. 103 

pina to the breathing, feeling woman at your 
side ; it is '^the transition from the statuesque, 
Rachelesque heroines of a David to the " small 
sweet idyl" of a Greuze. And, we confess it, 
we were not wholly at ease with those tragic, 
majestic figures. We shuddered at the dagger 
and the bowl which suited them so well. We 
marvelled at their bloodless serenity, their super- 
human self-sufficiency ; inly we questioned if 
they breathed and felt. Or was their circula- 
tion a matter of machinery — a mere dead-beat 
escapement ? We longed for the sexe pro- 
nonci of Rivarol — we longed for the show- 
man's " female woman." We respected and we 
studied, but we could not love them. 

With Madame de Lamballe the case is other- 
wise. Not grand like this one^ not heroic like 
that one, elle est mieux femme que ces aiitres. 
She, at least, is woman — after a fairer fashion — 
after a truer type. Not intellectually strong like 
Manon Phlipon, not Spartan-souled like Marie 
de Corday, she has still a rare intelligence, a 
courage of affection. She has that clairvoyance 
of the heart which supersedes all the stimulants 
of mottoes from Raynal, or maxims from Rous- 
seau ; she has that " angel instinct " which is a 
juster lawgiver than Justinian. It was thought 
praise to say of the Girondist lady that she was a 



104 Pour Frenchwomen, 

greater man than her husband ; it is praise to say 
of this queen's friend that she was more woman 
than Madame Roland. Not so grand, not so 
great, we like the princess best. Elle est mieux 
femme que ces autres. 



MADAME DE GENUS. 
1746-1830. 



" A learned lady, famed 

For every branch of every science known — 

In every Christian language ever named. 
With virtues equall'd by her wit alone : 

She made the cleverest people quite ashamed, 
And even the good with inward envy groan, 
Finding themselves so very much exceeded 
In their own way by all the things that she did." 

Don Juan, canto i. s. lo. 

*' Une femme auteicr — le plus gracieux et le plus 
galant des pedagogues ^ 

Sainte-Beuve. 



Madame de Gen lis (young). 



MADAME DE GENLIS. 
I. 

'T^HE portrait of Mademoiselle Stephanie- 
■*• Felicite-Ducrest de Saint-Aubin, otherwise 
Madame de Sillery-Genlis, which is inserted 
in Sainte-Beuve's Galerie des Femmes CdUbres, 
does not, at first sight, appear to support the 
quotations chosen for this paper. Indeed — re- 
membering her only as the respectable precep- 
tress who had prepared a King of France for 
the hardships and privations of a coming throne 
by perfecting him in the difficult accomplishments 
of sleeping comfortably upon a plank, and walk- 
ing leagues with leaden soles to his boots — we 
confess to having been somewhat startled by her 
personal advantages. This could never be the 
epicene genius whom Rivarol had twitted — the 
omniscient matron who had reserved for her old 
age the task of re-writing the Encyclopidie. 
O Dea certe ! we had said, but then it was 
not Venus that we thought of. Surely a 
stately presence, surely a personality preter- 
naturally imposing, Minerva-like, august — say 



io8 Four Frenchwomen. 

like Madame Dacier, whom we passed in seek- 
ing. Not at all I A sham bergdre sim^ply, from 
some rile Adam or Chantilly file — some 
batelUre de Vile d' Amour. A sidelong, self-con- 
scious, wide-eyed head, with a ribbon woven in 
the well-dressed hair — with the complexion of 
a miniature and the simper of Dresden china. 
The figure " languishes " with a cultivated aban- 
don. One hand trifles elegantly with a ringlet, 
the other falls with a graceful droop across her 
harp-strings. ^^ Je suis excessivement joUe,'' she 
seemed to say with a little confirmatory vibra- 
tion of a chord. If this is Erox^ne or Melicerte, 
she manages to wear her fichu with a " wild 
civility " that Myrtillo must find delightfully un- 
puritanic and enticing. If this is the simple shep- 
herd beauty, then heads must ferment as freely 
in Arcadia as in Palais Royal salons, for the 
modelled features have been excellently tutored, 
and the educated smile is most artistically con- 
ceived. But there is a book by her side, behind 
by the leafy trellis rises an easel, and this is 
Madame la Comtesse de Genlis — the accom- 
plished author, the governor of Louis Philippe, 
and the counsellor of Bonaparte^ very amiably 
self-satisfied, very characteristically posed, and 
"our mind's eye " is altogether in the wrong. 
We send off for her Memoirs, and study them 



Madame de Genlis, 109 

attentively. What has been discovered, with her 
assistance w^iil be presently disclosed, but just for 
a few lines it is needful to digress concerning 
Madame de Genlis in her capacity of writer. 

For she was a writer above all, this simpering, 
self-contented shepherdess whom we had mis- 
judged so sadly. " She would have invented 
the inkstand," says M. Sainte-Beuve, "if the 
inkstand had been uninvented." Not only did 
she scribble incessantly, but on themes most 
discordant and opposite. " Madame de Genlis," 
says a contemporary, " has written enormously. 
She has essayed almost every style, from the 
fugitive piece to the bulky alphabetical compil- 
ation, from the roman-poeme to the treatise on 
domestic economy and the collection of receipts 
for the kitchen. She has discoursed for the edu- 
cation of princes and of lacqueys ; she has pre- 
pared maxims for the throne and precepts for 
the pantry. And if we add to the variety of her 
productions the not less extraordinary diversity 
of her talents, and the marvels of her industry 
— ranging from wicker-work baskets to wigs d 
la hrigadi^re — we must certainly concede to 
Madame la Comtesse the gift of universality." 

At this distance of time, very little more than 
the reputation of universality remains. To use 
a homely figure, Madame la Comtesse was 



no Four Frenchwomen, 

"Jack of all trades and master of none" — a 
living exposition of the proverb, " Qui dit ama- 
teur, dit ignorant.'' With infinite curiosity, 
industry, and energy, and a vanity of science 
fed and fostered by her singular confidence in 
her own abilities, she frittered away her talents 
— the undoubted talents she undoubtedly had — 
in numberless v/orks of which barely the list 
survives in the columns of a bibliographical dic- 
tionary. She beat out her fine gold into the 
flattest and flimsiest of leaf^ and the leaves bound 
together form some eighty or ninety volumes. 
Once and again, perhaps, a novel bearing her 
name crops up in some new venture of French 
classics, yet it is but rarely, now-a-days, that 
one meets with any of the numerous literary 
offspring of the prolific genius who had lived as 
many years and written as many volumes as her 
great adversary, Voltaire. 

They need not detain us long, those " many 
volumes." Fuit is written everywhere upon 
that forgotten fame. The dust lies over it as 
deep as on the Cldlie of her childhood from 
which she first drew inspiration. Few seekers 
part the leaves in that Arcadia Deserta ; its 
arbours are uninhabitable, and its ornaments out 
of date. Erminias and Darmances sigh after a 
sterner fashion in modern novels : no Mayfair 



Madame de Genlis, iii 

lover dr^ks down the dried-up bouquet from his 
fair one's bosom " instead of tea." An enter- 
prising herborist^ perchance, might collect from 
its barren abundance a hortus-siccus of faded sen- 
timents ; a literary Livingstone, maybe, might 
pry amongst its mazes for Scuderi's Fleuve 
du Tendre, but for the ordinary latter-day reader 
its hour has struck. Only a few semi-educa- 
tional works — AdHe et TModore, Le ThMtre 
de rEducation, Les VeilUes du Chdteau, Les 
Legons d^une Gouvernante ; two or three histori- 
cal romances — Mademoiselle de Lafayette, 
Madame de Maintenon, La Duchesse de la Val- 
lidre ; and a short novelette — Mademoiselle de 
Clermont, which is held to be her masterpiece, 
have been singled out by the indulgence of 
modern criticism. To these for the present 
purpose we venture to add the eight volumes of 
Memoirs, and the delightful little collection of 
anecdotes and recollections entitled Souvenirs de 
Filicie. 

The Souvenirs de Fdlicie appeared at a fortu- 
nate moment. In 1804 France had passed 
through the Revolution, the Terror, and the Di- 
rectory, and was nearing the Empire. The Par- 
isians of 1804 were leagues away from the 
old gallant and gay noblesse that danced, and 
drank, and acted so light-heartedly through that 



112 Four Frenchwomen, 

'' Neapolitan festival " of theirs. Their soldier- 
successors were not unwilling to hear of them 
again. Madame la Comtesse had been with 
them and of them, and these extracts from her 
journals, sprightly and readable, had a merited 
success. The volume even now is excessively 
amusing, and its semi-anonymous character pre- 
serves it somewhat from the tiresome and intru- 
sive egotism that disfigures the Memoirs. 

It was twenty years after that she published 
the Memoirs^ when she was growing a rather 
slatternly old lady of fourscore. In these eight 
volumes she discourses in easy stages, reproduc- 
ing and diluting her recollections. Their worst 
fault is their bulk ; their garrulity one can almost 
pardon, for it helps us to the character of the 
writer. She is herself the matter of her book, 
to use the expression of Montaigne. She seems 
to have said, in the witty words of the younger 
.y Pliny, " I have no time to write a short letter, 
so I must e'en write along one.'' Nevertheless, 
her gossipings reward perusal. They constitute 
a great magazine of pre-revolutionary anecdote 
— they abound in curious details of the manners 
and pastimes of the day — they are full of clever 
. apprdciaiions (which have been called dipricia- 
lions, and are none the worse) of those trained 
talkers and brilliant beauties of the salons who 



Madame de Gen It's, 113 

had the Encyclopidistes for teachers and the 
Marechale de Luxembourg for oracle of tone — 
the *' good company," the " grand society" of 
ancient France which '' Europe came to copy, 

and vainly strove to imitate." , 

As she describes it, " Assume a virtue if you / 
have it not," appears to have been its motto. / 
Neither a stainless life nor a superior merit was 
indispensable to its elect. This sect, of supreme 
authority in all matters of etiquette, morality, 
and taste, admitted into its charmed circle both 
sheep and goat alike, provided they possessed 
certain superficial elegance of manner — a cer- 
tain distinctive hall-mark of rank or riches, court- 
credit or capacity. Its members had carried 
the art of savoir-vivre to an excellence unprece- 
dented save in their own country. Good taste 
had taught them to imitate the graces out of pure 
amenity — to observe restrictions, if only for the 
sake of convenience. To counterfeit gentleness, 
decency, reserve, modesty, toleration, and amia- 
bility—the outward and visible signs of good 
manners — seemed to be the surest method of 
attaining their end, which was at once to de- 
light and to enthrall. They had combined all 
the fashions of pleasing and of interesting with a 
marvellous adroitness. Discussion in their con- 
versation rarely or never degenerated into dis-^ 



114 Pour Frenchwomen, 

rpute ; they had banished scandal from their 
meetings as jarring with the suavity of manner 
which every one affected. Their politeness had 
all the urbanity and ease of a habit acquired in 
childhood, and fostered by nicety of character. 
They had learned to protect without patronising ; 
to listen with a flattering attention ; to praise 
without being either fulsome or insipid ;(to wel' 
>v' con^e a compliment without either receiving or 
rejecting it ; and they had thus created a com- 
munity which was quoted all over Europe as the 
most perfect model of refinement, of elegance, 
and of nobility. Admit that its charm was only 
veneer — veneer that shammed solidity — yet 
was it a veneer so rare and smooth, so sweetly 
aromatic and so delicate in grain, susceptible of 
so brilliant and so dazzling a polish, that easy- 
going people might well be pardoned if they 
mistook it for — nay, very possibly preferred it 
to — the less attractive excellences of the genu- 
ine rosewood or walnut. 

But we linger too long. It must be our ex- 
cuse that it is chiefly from this social point of 
view — as records of bygone manners — that we 
have considered Madame de Genlis's Memoirs. 
Taking upon ourselves little more than the 
modest office of Chorus, we propose to accom- 
pany her through these her chronicles. We 



Madame de Genlis, 115 

shall ask no pardon if we digress. Madame la 
Comtesse loses her own way so often that it is 
difficult not to stray in following her footsteps. 



IL 



It was in January, 1746 — or, to be histori- 
cally precise, on the 25th of January, 1746 — 
that Madame de Genlis " gave herself the trouble 
to be born." The phrase is used advisedly, for 
she undoubtedly belonged to that happy class 
who, as Beaumarchais alleged, had only to go 
through this trifling and unimportant preliminary 
in order to insure the success of their future 
lives. In common with most of the great 
geniuses of her age, as Voltaire, Rousseau, - 
Newton — and we marvel that her complacent 
vanity has omitted to point the comparison — 
she came into the world so small and sickly that -^ 
she was obliged to be pinned up in a pillow for 
warmth. In this condition, M. le Bailli, coming 
to make his compliments to her parents, and 
being short of sight, all but sat down upon the 
very chair in which the future governor of kings 
and counsellor of emperors had been placed for 
safety. 

Her father, M. de St. Aubin, was a gentle- 



ii6 Four Frenchwomen. 

man of Burgundy. He held a little estate at 
Champceri, near Autun ; but when his daughter 
was about six years old he purchased the marqui- 
sate of St. Aubin, and removed to the tumble- 
down chateau of that name which lay on the 
banks of the Loire, and was so skilfully designed 
that the river could not be perceived from any 
of its windows Her mother, a Mademoiselle 
de Mezieres, seems to have troubled herself 
/ very little -4 being greatly preoccupied with the 
"^ exigencies of an idle life_^ about her daughter's 
education. Her father, she says, confined him- 
self to overcoming her antipathy to insects, 
" particularly spiders and frogs." (!) Until she 
came to St. Aubin she seems to have been left 
almost entirely to the femmes-de-chambre, of 
whom there were four (a fact which seems to 
imply that M. de St. Aubin's income of 500/. a 
year must have been infinitely more elastic than 
at present), who instructed her in the Catechism, 
and in addition filled her head with romances 
and fanciful stories. At St. Aubin she was for 
a time consigned to the village schoolmistress, 
who taught her to read. '^As I had a very 
good memory, I learned rapidly, and at the end 
of six or seven months I read fluently." She 
then had a governess from Brittany, Mademoi- 
selle de Mars, under whose auspices she con- 



Madame de Genlts. 117 

tinued the study of the Catechism, a little history, 
a little music, a great deal of Mademoiselle de 
Scuderi's Clelie, and the now forgotten tragedies 
of Mademoiselle Marie-Anne Barbier. Writing 
she taught herself afterwards, at the age of 
eleven. 

Even at this time she displayed the ruling 
passions of her life for scribbling and teaching. 
At eight, she says, long before she could write, 
she was already dictating little romances and 
comedies to Mademoiselle de Mars ; and we 
find her clandestinely keeping a school of little 
urchins who came to cut rushes under the ter- 
race before her bedroom, on those days when 
her governess was occupied with her home 
correspondence : — 

'' I soon took it into my head to give them 
lessons — that is to say, to teach them what I 
knew myself — the Catechism, a verse or two 
of Mademoiselle Barbier's tragedies, and what I 
had learned by heart of the elements of music. 
Leaning upon the wall of the terrace, I gave 
them these fine lessons in the gravest way in the 
world. I had a great deal of trouble in making 
them speak the verses, on account of their Bur- 
gundian patois; but I was patient, and they were 
docile. My little pupils, ranged along the wall 
among the reeds and rushes, nose in air in order 



ii8 Four Frenchwomen, 

to see me, listened with the greatest attention, 
for I promised them rewards, and in fact threw 
them down fruit, little cakes, and all kinds of 
trifles. ... At last Mademoiselle de Mars sur- 
prised me one day in the midst of my academy. 
She did not scold me, but she laughed so heartily 
at the way in which my pupils repeated the 
poetry, that she entirely put me out of conceit 
with my learned functions." 

At this time she was called the Countess de 
Lancy. A year before, her mother had carried 
her to Paris, where, according to the prevailing 
code of fashion, she had been tortured by den- 
tists, squeezed by staymakers in the orthodox 
strait-waistcoats, pinched in tight shoes, com- 
pelled to wear goggles for squinting, and deco- 
rated with an iron collar to correct her country 
attitudes. Moreover, she learned to wear a 
hoop ; a master was hired to teach her to walk, 
and she was forbidden to run, to jump, and to ask 
questions. For the child of 17^0 only differed 
from her mother in this — that she was seen 
through the wrong end of the opera-glass. Sub- 
sequently our heroine had been taken to Lyons 
for the purpose of procuring her reception as a 
canoness in the neighbouring chapter of Alix — 
a kind of honorary novitiate very much ^ la 
mode among the nobility, which left to the 



Madame de Genlis. 119 

novice the option of later taking the vows ; but, 
in any case, gave her the advantage of certain 
privileges and decorations. She thus describes 
her reception in the church of the chapter : — 

'' All the sisters — dressed in the fashion of 
the day, but v^earing black silk gowns over 
hoops, and large cloaks lined with ermine — 
were in the choir. A priest, styled the grand 
prior, examined us " [her cousin was admitted 
at the same time], " made us repeat the Credo ^ 
and afterwards kneel down on velvet cushions. 
It was then his duty to cut off a little lock of 
hair ; but as he was very old and almost blind, 
he gave me a little snip, which I bore heroically 
without a murmur, until it was at last found out 
by the bleeding of my ear. This done, he put 
on my finger a consecrated gold ring, and fas- 
tened on my head a little piece of black-and- 
white stuff, about three inches long, which the 
canonesses termed a husband " \un mart]. " He 
then invested me with the insignia of the order, 
— a red ribbon with a beautiful enamelled cross, 
and a broad black watered sash. This cere- 
mony finished, he addressed us briefly, after 
which we saluted all the canonesses, and then 
heard high mass. From this moment I was 
called Madame la Comtesse de Lancy" [a rank 
to which the canonesses of Alix were entitled]. 



I20 Four Frenchwomen. 

"My father was lord of Bourbon-Lan^:/ " [a 
town some two leagues from St. Aubin], " and 
for this reason the name was given to me. The 
pleasure of hearing myself called madame afforded 
me more delight than all the rest." 

The most important business of her childhood 
seems to have been one in which she always ap- 
pears, wittingly and unwittingly, to have greatly 
excelled, namely, acting. We need scarcely say 
that France, during the latter half of the cen- 
tury especially, went mad for private theatricals. 
All the world — the great world, of course, and 
not the mere hemisphere — was most emphati- 
cally a stage. No country house but had its 
company of comedians, no farmer-general but 
had his carpenters and scene-painters. There 
were countesses who rivalled Clairon, and 
princes who rivalled Pr^ville. There were 
theatres everywhere — at Chantilly, at Villers- 
Cotterets, at I'lle Adam, at Little Trianon — 
nay, for so does the fashion fix its stamp upon 
the age, even in that far tropical Arcadia of 
theirs we shall find Paul and Virginia acting 
Boaz and Ruth, to the sound of a tom-tom, 
among the palms and ebony-trees of the Mau- 
ritius. '*To play comedy well," says M. Bar- 
ri^re in his Preface to the Souvenirs de Fdlicie^ 
"became the all-important business — the na- 



Madame de Genlis, 



121 



tional movement, as it were, of this singular 
epoch. It seemed as if France, involved under 
Louis XV. in her finances, disgraced in her po- 
litical relations, and (hardest to believe I ) fallen 
from her military reputation, no longer attached 
value, interest, or glory except to theatrical suc- 
cesses. The taste for acting had absorbed all 
classes, levelled all distinctions, connected and 
confounded all ranks of society." 

At the present moment, however, it is with a 
certain Burgundian company that we are more 
particularly concerned. In 1755, M. de St. 
Aubin, growing tired of the country, had gone 
to Paris for six months (these separations of 
husband and wife being quite en r^gle, if not de 
ri^ueur), and her mother, the better to employ 
the tedious hours of alienation, began at the 
end of two months to prepare a fite for his 
return. But — place aux dames — Madame la 
Comtesse de Lancy shall speak for herself : — 

" She" [her mother] " composed a kind of 
comic opera in the pastoral style, with a mytho- 
logical prologue in which I played Cupid. All 
her lady's-maids — and she had four, all young 
and pretty — took part in it. Besides this a 
tragedy was attempted, and they chose Iphigenie 
en Aulide " [Racine] ; '' my mother took Clytem- 
nestra, and the part of Iphigenia was given to 



122 Four Frenchwomen. 

me. A medical man of Bourbon-Lancy, named 
Pinot, played Agamemnon, and his eldest son, 
a youth of eighteen, had a prodigious success 
in the character of the impetuous Achilles. . . . 
My mother, in order to provide the requisite 
costumes, cut up her dresses in the most ruthless 
manner. I shall never forget that my Cupid's 
dress in the prologue was pink, covered with 
point-lace sprinkled all over with little artificial 
flowers of different colours ; it reached down to 
my knees. I had little boots of straw colour and 
silver, my long hair fell upon my shoulders, and 
I had blue wings. My Iphigenia's dress, over a 
large hoop " [Iphigenia in a large hoop I ] *' was 
oilampas ' [a kind of brocaded silk], " cherry 
colour and silver, and trimmed with sable." 

En viriU Mademoiselle must have been rav'is- 
sante, and we should have been the first to tell 
her so, certain that our remarks would have 
been properly appreciated. Let us add that she 
completely vanquished the impetuous Achilles, 
who made her a proposal in form after one of 
the rehearsals. She was then eleven, but she 
thoroughly appreciated the obligation she had 
conferred upon society at that important act of 
her nativity. " That a doctor's son, a man who 
was not a gentleman, should have had the au- 
dacity to speak of love to Madame la Com- 



Madame de Genlis. 123 

tesse I " Atrocious I " The young man was " 
— we rejoice to record it — " reprimanded by 
his father as he deserved to be." 

Meanwhile the rehearsals went on briskly, 
and the company grew more and more used to 
the boards. At the end of three months they 
were playing Voltaire's Zaire, in which Ma- 
dame de Lancy took the part of the heroine ; 
then the Folies Amoureuses of Regnard, in 
which she played Agatha. The so-called re- 
hearsals were, in fact, performances, as numbers 
of spectators came from Bourbon-Lancy and 
Moulins, and " these eternal fStes,'" she re- 
marks, "must have cost a good deal of 
money." 

Here is a comical incident at one of them : — 
" There was a part of the prologue that I 
liked immensely, and certainly the idea was a 
novel one. As I have said^ I played Cupid, 
and a little boy from the village represented 
Pleasure. I had to sing some verses which 
were supposed to be addressed to my father, 
and which ended with these words : — 

* Au Plaisir farrache les ailes 
Po7ir le mieux fixer pres de vmis^ 

and as I concluded I had to seize the little 
Pleasure and pluck away his wings. But it 
happened one day at a grand dress-rehearsal, 



124 Four Frenchwomen. 

that the wings, being too firmly fixed, resisted 
all my efforts. Vainly I shook Pleasure : his 
wings had grown to his shoulders. I became 
excited and threw him down, crying piteously ; 
I never let him go, all tumbled though he was, 
and finally, to my lasting honour, tore away the 
wings of the now disconsolate Pleasure, who 
roared with vexation." 

Her Cupid's costume was considered to be so 
becoming that she wore nothing else, and took 
her walks abroad with all the paraphernalia, 
quiver at back and bow in hand. All her 
dresses were made to pattern. She had a week- 
day Cupid's dress and a Sunday Cupid's dress. 
The only difference was that the celestial at- 
tributes were removed, and the costume slightly 
monasticised by a covering cloak, when she 
went to church. " Friendship," says the pretty 
French proverb which Byron has made the bur- 
den of a song, " is Love without his wings." 
So the little Countess de Lancy went week- 
days en Amour and Sundays en AmitU. If we 
might be permitted to push the fancy further, 
we should say that this was very much her po- 
sition throughout life. The world certainly had 
her love and the best of her time, but we ques- 
tion very much whether her vaunted attachment 
to the Church was anything more than a deco- 



Madame de Genlis. 125 

rous acquaintanceship, or species of unwinged 
affection. 

She kept her Cupid's dress and name for some 

. nine months. M. de St. Aubin, possibly pre- 
ferring the attractions of Paris to the country 
theatricals which awaited him, had been a year 
and a-half away, and still the fetes are continued. 
Her mother, wishing to add dancing to music 
and tragedy, invited a danseuse from Autun, 
who taught her to dance a minuet and an entrie. 
But Mademoiselle Mions saltatory exertions 
required so much succour from stimulants that 
she was discharged, and succeeded by a pro- 
fessor of fifty, who was a fencing-master as 
well. To the entrie he added a saraband, and 
finally taught her to fence, which greatly de- 
lighted her. She succeeded so well that her 
mother decided to let her play Darviane in the 
Mdlanide of La Chauss^e, a part in which she 
had to draw sword and defend herself. After 
this she wore a " charming male costume" until 
she left Burgundy, a circumstance which, never- 
theless, did not prevent her from habitually 
assisting at the procession of the F^te Dieu 

/^attired as an angel. 

No one, she says, confessor included, was 
ever — to her knowledge at least — at all scan- 
dalised by this extraordinary equipment and 



126 Four Frenchwomen, 

education. " However, I gained in this way 
— that my feet were better turned, and I walked 
far better than most women, while I was cer- 
tainly more active than any I have known. I 
led a charming life : in the morning I played a 
little on the harpsichord and sang ; then I learnt 
my parts, and then I took my dancing lesson and 
fenced ; after this I read until dinner-time with 
Mademoiselle de Mars." 



III. 



By this time the dilapidated Chateau St. Au- 
bin threatened to fall about their ears, and the 
mother and daughter removed to Bourbon- 
Lancy, where M. de St. Aubin at length joined 
them in 1757, when the flies were of course 
continued. It is now his turn to be left be- 
hind, and the mother and daughter spend a con- 
siderable time at Paris with Madame de St, 
Aubin's sister, Madame de Belleveau. Then 
M. de St. Aubin, who, in all probability, had 
been burning the other end of the candle in the 
capital, is discovered to be ruined — a circum- 
stance which reduces their income to about fifty 
pounds a year, and causes a quarrel between the 
sisters. Mademoiselle de Mars is naturally dis- 



Madame de Genlis, 127 

pensedwith. M. de St. Aubin, after some little 
stay in Burgundy, goes to St. Domingo to re- 
trieve his fortune, and his wife and daughter 
find a temporary asylum at Passy in the house 
of a fashionable Maecenas and farmer-general, 
M. de la Popelini^re. 

Here our heroine's theatrical and musical at- 
tainments obtained her no small credit. She 
took soubrettes' and ingenues' parts in the pieces 
of M. de la Popeliniere, and in one of these 
danced a dance which, she complacently re- 
marks, had the greatest success. Here, too, 
she began to acquire, under Gaiffre, otherwise 
" King David," that art of harp-playing in which 
she afterwards excelled. Our host was enchanted 
with our little talents, and would frequently ex- 
claim with a sigh, " What a pity it is that she is 
only thirteen I " which was fully understood and 
appreciated. And, indeed, if we had been a 
little older he should not have sighed in vain, 
although he was over sixty-five. Every con- 
sideration should fall before our respect for 
age. In any other case we can be firm, as for 
example when we reject a M. de Monville — 
who, by our own showing, had every good qual- 
ity, except quality — upon very much the same 
grounds as the impetuous Achilles. She has 
chronicled one of her habits while at Passy, to 



128 Four Frenchwomen, 

which, doubtless, she owed much of that easy 
fluency which no one has ever attempted to deny 
to her„ In her walks with Mademoiselle Vic- 
toire, her mother' s femme-de-chambre, who took 
charge of her, pice Mademoiselle de Mars dis- 
pensed with, she was accustomed to employ 
herself in the following manner : — While Ma- 
demoiselle Victoire sat down and knitted, the 
little lady marched backwards and forwards be- 
fore her, rehearsing imaginary dialogues and 
building innumerable castles in the air. 

'' In these first dialogues, I always assumed 
that Mademoiselle de Mars had come to see me 
secretly. I related to her all that happened to 
me, all that I thought : / made her speak per- 
fectlf in character. She gave me very good 
advice for the present and for the future, and 
recounted to me also, on her part, all kinds of 
things, which / invented with marvellous facility. 
I grew so fond of these imaginary conversations 
that I doubt whether the reality would have had 
a greater charm for me, and I was sadly discon- 
certed when Mademoiselle Victoire put an end 
to them by carrying me away, protesting to my 
imaginary friend that I should return on the 
following day at the same hour." 

Madame du Deffand, philosophising one day 
from her ''tub," divided the world into three 



Madame de Genlis, 129 

classes — les trompeurs, les tromp^s, et les trom- 
pettes. Madame de Lancy — witness those ital- 
icised sentences, witness her memoirs passim — 
belonged, undoubtedly, to the last of these. 
But she has been criticised as if vanity was a 
rarity, or self-laudation an uncommon and a 
monstrous feature of this kind of composition. 
It is but fair, however, to remember that in this 
case the education of the writer had peculiarly 
qualified her for the style, that her talents had 
hit the taste of the time, and gained her ex- 
travagant applause, and that, at least, she seems 
to have been thoroughly aware of her fault. 

"Since I had lost Mademoiselle de Mars" 
[who, by the way, appears to have been rather 
more sensible than those about her], " vanity had 
become the chief motive of all my actions. My 
heart and my reasoning powers were so little cul- 
tivated, I was praised so extravagantly for tri- 
fles, that I had acquired a puerile amour propre 
which made me attach an absurd importance 
to all the merely ornamental talents which could 
give a certain celebrity." 

Quitting Passy, the mother and daughter re- 
turned to Paris lodgings, where the music and 
singing made great progress. At this time, she 
says, she practised from eight to ten hours a day. 
The famous Philidor gives her lessons, and she 

9 



130 Four Frenchwomen, 

learns to use several instruments, among others 
that one which the late M. Victor Hugo per- 
sisted in calling the " bugpipe." But the harp 
is preferred before all ; indeed, she takes credit 
for having made the instrument fashionable — 
and " King David's fortune." 

The summer of 1761 v^as spent in another 
country house, w^here they make the acquaint- 
ance of that Madame d'Esparb^s of the little 
hands whose privilege it was to peel cherries for 
Louis XV., a distinction which was so highly 
valued that the lady is said to have endured 
frequent bleeding in order to maintain their 
" dazzling whiteness." After this Madame de 
St. Aubin took a small house in the Rue 
d'Aguesseau, where, among other visitors, come 
the pastellist Latour, the musician and chess- 
player, Philidor, and Honavre, the pianist. 
They saw a great deal of good society, but 
her instinctive good taste, she tells us, warned 
her that her mother was far too prodigal of her 
daughter's singing and playing. 

Meanwhile M. de St. Aubin, returning from 
St. Domingo, it is to be presumed with his 
fortune retrieved, was taken by the English and 
imprisoned at Launceston. At Launceston he 
formed the acquaintance of a brother in mis- 
fortune, the Count Brulart de Genlis, an officer 



Madame de Genlis, 131 

in the navy, who not only procured his friend's 
release after he had been himself set free, but 
upon his descriptions and the judicious exhibi- 
tion of a portrait, fell in love with Madame de 
Lancy. Her father died shortly after his return 
to France of a disorder aggravated by pecuniary 
difficulties. His widow found a temporary re- 
fuge in the Convent of the Filles du Pricieux 
Sang. Here our heroine received an offer of 
marriage from a friend of her father — the Baron 
d'Andlau, who conceived the original idea of 
forwarding his bulky pedigree by his valet, to 
assist her in the consideration of the matter, 
but without success. Probably the fact that 
M. de Genlis's uncle was Minister for Foreign 
Affairs, which made him a more eligible suitor, 
had something to do with it. We all know that 
Miss Rebecca Sharpe — who in many things is 
not unlike Madame de Lancy — would have 
been barely courteous to Jos. Sedley if she hap- 
pened to hope that Captain Rawdon Crawley 
would prance up on his black charger from the 
Knightsbridge Barracks. The Baron, however, 
determined to be of the family, and resigning the 
filia pulchrior, laid siege to the pulchra maier, 
whom he married about eighteen months after. 

From the Prdcieux Sang they moved to Ma- 
dame du Deffand's convent, St. Joseph. Madame 



132 Four Frenchwomen. 

de Lancy's dates and age depend very often upon 
her momentary taste and fancy ; but it was ap- 
parently during her stay here, or in November, 
1763, v^hen she was seventeen, she says, that, 
much to the disgust of his very arbitrary guar- 
dian, M. de Genlis married her. With the 
exception of his brother, M. le Marquis de 
Genlis, most of her husband's relatives scouted 
the pair, and after a week or two M. de Genlis 
carried her to the convent of Origny. Here 
she remained until April, 1764, while her hus- 
band was in garrison at Nancy, for he was now 
a colonel of grenadiers, and she seems to have 
passed the time very pleasantly. We have here- 
tofore seen her as Cupid ; she now appears as 
Puck, to say nothing of a part seldom attempted 
by ladies : — 

'' I cried a good deal at losing M. de Genlis " 
[she had a * gift of tears ' quite equal to Loyola's] , 
."and afterwards amused myself immensely at 
Origny. ... I had a pretty room inside the con- 
vent with my maid, and I had a servant who 
lodged with theabbess's people in the outer build- 
ing. ... I enjoyed myself, and they liked me ; 
I often played my harp to Madame TAbbesse ; 
I sang motets in the organ-gallery of the church, 
and played tricks upon the nuns. I scoured the 
corridors at night-time — that is to say, at mid- 



Madame de Genlis, 133 

night — attired usually 'en diable,' with horns 
and a blackened face, and in this guise I woke up 
the younger nuns, whilst I crept softly into the 
cells of the older ones, whom I knew to be 
thoroughly deaf, and rouged and patched them 
carefully without disturbing their slumbers. 
They got up every night to go to the choir, 
and one may fancy their surprise when, having 
dressed hastily without glasses, they met in the 
church and found themselves thus travestied. 
I went freely into the cells, for the nuns are for- 
bidden to lock themselves in, and are obliged to 
leave their keys in the doors both day and night. 
During the whole of the Carnival I gave balls 
twice a week in my room with the permission 
of the abbess. They allowed me to have in the 
village fiddler, who was sixty years of age and 
blind of one eye. He piqued himself upon 
knowing all the steps and figures, and I re- 
member that he called the chasses, fianquds. 
My company was composed of nuns and pen- 
sionnaires : the former acted as men, the latter 
were the ladies. My refreshments consisted of 
cider and excellent pastry, which was made in 
the convent. I have been to many grand balls 
since, but I question whether I ever danced at 
any more heartily or with greater gaiety." 
Yet, notwithstanding all these escapades, she 



134 ^<^^^ Frenchwomen, 

still found time to acquire various kinds of in- 
formation. She learned to bring up fowls, to 
make pastry and side-dishes. " My guitar, my 
harp, and my pen employed me a great part of 
the day, and I devoted at least two hours every 
morning to reading. I was very ignorant of 
books, for up to that period all my time had 
been devoted to music." At Origny, too, she 
systematically perfects her fictitious dialogues ; 
at Origny, again, she begins to make copious 
extracts from all she reads, and to scribble 
verses — among other things an epistle upon the 
" Tranquillity of the Cloister." 

In the spring of 1764 M. de Genlis fetched 
away his affectionate wife, who accompanied 
him very unwillingly to his brother's seat at 
Genlis. M. le Marquis de Genlis was at this 
time " under the ban." His arbitrary guardian, 
M. de Puisieux, had not only already shut him 
up for five years in the Castle of Saumur for his 
incorrigible gaming, but he had for the last two 
been living in a kind of exile at his estate of 
Genlis, under pain of making a good marriage. 
At the present moment he was absent at Paris, 
we presume upon what Mr. Weller the elder 
calls " patrole." 

At Genlis the newly-married pair appear to 
have lived very happily ; and here, aided by the 



Madame de Genlis, 135 

counsels of a second-rate man of letters, M. de 
Sauvigny, Madame de Genlis pursued her mul- 
tifarious studies with great energy : -— 

" Every day, when we came in from walking, 
we" [M. de Genlis, M. de Sauvigny, and her- 
self] " read aloud for an hour. In a space of 
four months we thus got through the ' Lettres 
Provinciales,' the letters of Madame de Sevigne, 
and the plays of Corneille. Besides this I read 
in my room, and time passed very pleasantly 
and quickly. A surgeon of La Fere, called Mo 
Milet, used to come to Genlis every week ; with 
him I went over my old anatomical studies, and, 
moreover, learned to bleed, an accomplishment 
which I have since perfected under the learned 
Chamousset. I learned also to dress wounds. 
In fact, I. lost no opportunity," etc. 

Then she learns riding under the auspices of 
a soldier of fortune in the neighbourhood, and 
is almost lost in seeking adventurously for un- 
discovered countries. 

" But this new passion did not make me 
neglect either my music or my studies ; M. de 
Sauvigny superintended my reading, and I made 
extracts. I had discovered in the pantry a large 
folio book, intended for the kitchen accounts ; I 
had taken possession of it, and I wrote down in 
it a detailed journal of my doings and reflections, 



136 Four Frenchwomen, 

intending to give it to my mother when com- 
pleted ; I wrote every day a few lines, some- 
times whole, pages. Neglecting no branch of 
learning, I endeavoured to gain some insight 
into field-labour and gardening. I went to see 
the cider made. I went to watch all the work- 
men in the village at work, — the carpenter, the 
weaver, the basket-maker, etc. I learned to 
play at billiards and several games of cards, as 
piquet, reversis, etc. M. de Genlis drew figures 
and landscapes capitally " [_parfaitement is her 
word] " in pen and ink ; I commenced drawing 
and flower-painting." 

M. le Marquis de Genlis having managed to 
find his heiress, is married to her, and every- 
thing in consequence goes merry as his marriage- 
bell. In September, 176=,, Madame de Genlis 
becomes a mother, after which she is visited by 
her relations, who thereupon carry her to court. 
She has left a most laughable description of the 
terrors of her toilet, over which important busi- 
ness Madame de Puisieux and her daughter, the 
Marechale d'Estr^e, wrangle most unbecomingly. 
Her hair is thrice dressed before her judges de- 
cide how it shall be finally worn. They rouge 
and powder her most lavishly. Then they insist 
upon squeezing her into her " dress body,'' in 
order that she may grow accustomed to it, 



Madame de Genlis, 137 

lacing her so tightly that she can barely endure 
the pressure. An angry and prolonged dispute 
afterwards arises upon the question of the ruff, 
during which time the unfortunate candidate for 
court honours is obliged to stand, and when the 
debate is over, she is so worn out that she can 
hardly walk in to dinner. The ruif is taken off 
and replaced at least four times, and the matter 
is at last decided by the overwhelming influence 
of the Marechale's waiting-maids. After the 
farce of dinner (for she is too tightly laced to 
eat anything), during the whole of which the 
discussion is carried on with great acrimony, 
she is requested to get into her hoop and train, 
in order to rehearse the curtsey which Gardel, 
the ballet-master of the opera, has been occu- 
pied in teaching her. This is a partial success, 
although Madame de Puisieux forbids her to 
slide back her foot in order to disengage her 
train, a course which leaves her no resource but 
to fall upon her face, in order to avoid the other 
extreme of being "theatrical." At last, when 
they start, she manages secretly to remove a 
little of the obnoxious colour ; but Madame de 
Puisieux immediately pulls out a rouge-box, and 
plasters her more thickly than before. How- 
ever, everything goes off well, and she manages 
to admire the king. 



138 Four Frenchwomen. 

In 1766 she again has a daughter, after which 
her aunt, the Madame de Montesson who mar- 
ried the Duke of Orleans in 1773, takes her to 
rile Adam, the famous country house of the 
Prince de Conti, which for a jeune personne 
was the highest of honours. Thence they fare 
to Villers-Cotterets, the seat of the Duke of 
Orleans, and afterwards to Madame de Pui- 
sieux's, at Sillery, where the young countess, 
returning to that character of ingdnue which she 
had played so successfully at Passy, constructs 
and acts out a clever little drawing-room scene 
which completely wins over the elder lady, who 
had hitherto been anything but amiable. 

To sum up. The " royal blue eyes " of 
majesty have shone upon her, and she is marked 
with the Versailles sign-manual. She has ap- 
peared at rile Adam, and propitiated her unpro- 
pitious relatives. She may now be said to have 
made her ddhut. 



IV. 

Restless and frivolous, ennuyds and blasts, 
asking incessantly, like her friend M. Dam6- 
zague, ^^ Que firons-nous demain matin}'' the 
fine gentlemen and ladies of 1765 gave a warm 
welcome to the new debutante in good society. 



Madame de Genlis. 139 

She was young and handsome, a capital actress 
and a better musician ; she had in reality, or 
affected to have, a childish gaiety and an insati- 
able appetite for freak which were quite in keep- 
ing with the reigning fashion, whilst her uneasy 
craving for notoriety occupied her unceasingly 
in catering for the public amusement. The 
record of the next dozen years of her life is 
trifling enough. It is an endless chronicle of 
tricks and mystifications, of mummeries and tra- 
vesties ; an interlude which is all the play — 
or, better, a comidie-hallet after the fashion 
of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme or the Malade 
Imaginaire. Now, like a modern Poppsea, we 
see her riding off on a donkey, in company with 
the Marquise de Genlis, both disguised as peas- 
ants, to buy up all the milk in the vicinity, in 
order to have a bath d la Romaine ; now se- 
cretly learning the dulcimer in a garret at Sil- 
lery, with the view of surprising Madame de 
Puisieux in the character of a jeune AlsaciennCy 
whose costume, it is needless to say, she wears 
for a fortnight afterwards. Acting always — in 
Norman country houses to audiences of five hun- 
dred, at rile Adam, at Villers-Cotterets, at Sil- 
lery, at Vaudreuil — and with a success that 
draws tears of vexation from her less-gifted sis- 
ters. At one place they will barely relinquish 



140 Four Frenchwomen » 

her at bed-time, her bon-mots are cited, and her 
merits rehearsed by common consent. She ap- 
pears, too, to have been sufficiently satisfied 
with the life she led — at all events, before she 
entered the Palais Royal. '' This was styled 
a frivolous kind of existence," says she, speak- 
ing of M. d'Albaret, fribble and virtuoso; "as 
for me, I think it far happier and more amiable 
than a life devoted to the acquisition of wealth 
or the intrigues of ambition." Moreover, her 
intention in the preservation of these things is 
purely utilitarian. She is good enough, in fact, 
to furnish us with the moral — d sa manUre. 
A propos of the fore-mentioned Alsacian dis- 
guise, she writes — " It is not without design 
that I enter into these minor details ; they will 
not be wholly useless to young ladies who may 
hereafter peruse this work. I wish to persuade 
them that youth is never happy unless it is ami- 
able — that is to say, docile, modest, and at- 
tentive — and that the true role " [always a rolCj 
be it observed I ] " of a jeune personne is to 
please in her family, and to bring into it gaiety, 
amusement, and joy." The sentiments are ir- 
reproachable. Let us trust that the jeune per- 
sonne will not mistake the wearing of becoming 
fancy-dresses, the frequent exhibition of her 
" little talents," and the continual gratification 



Madame de Genlis. 141 

of her vanity and love of praise, as the primary 
and principal means to the end she has in 
vievi^. 

Perhaps the best idea of her mode of life at 
this time may be gained by the recital of her 
visit to Vaudreuil, in Normandy, the seat of the 
President Portal. Here, responding to M. 
Dam^zague's eternal '^ Que f irons-nous demain 
matin ) " we find her organising and drilling a 
company of amateurs ; acting a piece by herself 
in order to teach them ; wanting a drama in two 
days based upon a local tradition (with a "charm- 
ing rdle " for herself of a wigged and bearded 
old man) ; re-casting in six more Favart's three- 
act comedy of " Les Trois Sultanes,'' with another 
part for herself in which she sings, and dances, 
and plays on the harp, the harpsichord, the bag- 
pipe, the guitar, the dulcimer, and the hurdy- 
gurdy. Nor must it be supposed that she could 
do no more. " I only wanted my pardessus de 
viole,'' she writes, " but I had not used it for 
more than three years, and my mandolin would 
have had but a poor success after my guitar, 
which I played infinitely better." Eight instru- 
ments in all — nine, in point of fact, if we 
add another upon which her proficiency is re- 
markable, but which politeness forbids us again 
to particularise. 



142 Four Frenchwomen. 

From Vaudreuil they made an excursion to 
Dieppe to visit the ocean, which as yet she had 
not seen. In the face of Nature, she takes care 
to tell us, she was so profoundly impressed that 
her companions complained of her dullness ; 
nor does she omit to state that Neptune re- 
ceived her very discourteously. When they 
returned to Vaudreuil they find that the presi- 
dent had received information that certain ad- 
miring corsairs, who had witnessed the marine 
exploits of Madame la Comtesse and Madame 
de Merode, her companion, had determined, in 
consequence, to carry them off to the Grand 
Seigneur's seraglio. The only way in which 
they can preserve themselves from so eminent 
and imminent a fate is to be received as Vestals 
in the temple of the Petit hois — a species of sanc- 
tuary in the president's private garden, which was 
reserved for the more select and sacred of his 
entertainments en petit comitL To this temple 
they were conducted by the nephew of their 
host, the Count de Caraman, who left them al- 
most immediately. Here they found the High 
Priestess (Madame de Puisieux) and the High 
Priest (M. de Portal) waiting to receive them. 
The temple was decked ftrh-orni) with garlands, 
and the ladies of the company made up its chaste 
sisterhood. When, with appropriate verses, they 



Madame de Genlis. ■ I43 

had been admitted, and the evening shades were 
closing in, a terrible noise of Turkish music is 
heard approaching; it is the Grand Seigneur 
himself coming in person to besiege the temple. 
The Pontifex Maximus resents this infringement, 
and refuses to sanction the entry of the Infidels. 
Thereupon some three hundred Turks leap the 
walls (this is exquisite fooling 1) and carry off 
the Vestals willy-nilly. Madame la Comtesse 
being slightly frightened and out of temper, 
seems to have behaved with an intractable and 
*' savao-e virtue " that would have done credit to 
a better cause, and which was certainly quite an 
unexpected surprise to her exalted lover (M. de 
Caraman), who was glittering with gold and 
precious stones, and who looked, she records, 
uncommonly ill in his turban. She absolutely 
refused to be abducted, and this so rudely, that 
he was greatly hurt. Laying hold of the lady, 
he is pinched and scratched and kicked about 
the legs (she says so) until the maltreated gen- 
tleman at last loses his temper, and carries her 
off in a fury. She is placed in a gorgeous pal- 
anquin, and followed on foot by the irate Sultan, 
limping, possibly, and reproaching her bitterly. 
In the palanquin, however, soothed by the splen- 
dour and the tribute to her talents, she recovers 
her equanimity, and manages to mollify his of- 



144 Pour Frenchwomen, 

fended Magnificence. The party are carried 
through the illuminated gardens to a grandly- 
decorated ball-room at the end of the park. 
Here the delighted Oriental declares Madame 
la Comtesse to be his favourite Sultana ; they 
dance all night, and, plaudite gentes, the little 
play is over, and the drop falls to the entire sat- 
isfaction of every one concerned. 

Among other things the idlers of 1766 were 
indebted to her for an ingenious novelty v^hich 
she contrived for the balls of Madame de Crenay 
— the Quadrille des Proverbes. 

" Each couple, in the preliminary two-and- 
two procession w^hich alv^ays preceded the per- 
formance, represented a proverb, and every one 
had chosen a motto. We had unanimously given 
Madame de Lauzun " [Amelie de Boufflers, 
afterw^ards guillotined] , " ^ Bonne renommie vaut 
mieux que ceinture dorie.' She was dressed v^^ith 
the greatest simplicity, and vi^ore a plain grey 
girdle. She danced v^ith M. de Belzunce. The 
Duchess de Liancourt danced W\ih the Count de 
Boulainviliers, v^ho v^ore the costume of an old 
man ; their motto w^as — ' A vieux chat jeune 
souris.' Madame de Marigni danced w^ith M. de 
St. Julien, dressed as a negro : she passed her 
handkerchief from time to time over his face, 
which signified, ' A laver la tite d'un Maure on 



Madame de Genlis. I45 

ferd sa lessive,' I don't remember the proverb 
or the partner of my sister-in-law, the Marquise 
de Genlis. My own dancer was the Vicomte 
de Laval, magnificiently attired and blazing with 
jewellery. I was dressed as a peasant girl. Our 
proverb was, ' Contentement passe richesse.' I 
appeared gay and lively ; the vicomte, without 
any acting, looked sad and ennuyL Thus we 
made ten. I had written the air — it was very 
pretty and easily danced to. Gardel composed 
the figures, which, in accordance with my idea, 
represented another proverb — ' Reculer pour 
mieux sauter.' He made of this the prettiest 
and liveliest quadrille that I have ever seen." 

It had a great success, notwithstanding the 
schemes of an envious coalition, who attempted 
to disturb the performers at the bal de VOp^ra 
by the gambols of an immense cat (a little Savo- 
yard In disguise), which represented an adverse 
proverb — " // ne faut pas riveiller le chat qui 
dorC The spectators, however, interfered to 
protect the dancers. 

For all that they were the polished exemplars 
whom uncouth Europeans " came to copy, and 
vainly strove to imitate " — amongst the rest 
Mr. Laurence Sterne, who is here in 1762, a 
fortnight deep in dinners and suppers, and pro- 
testing that in savoir-vivre the place exceeds all 

10 



146 Four Frenchwomen, 

places on the globe — these fine ladies and gen- 
tlemen did a number of little things, doubtless 
in the " pure innocence " which prompted his 
Tristram — 

" That would have made Punctilio stare and gasp." 

The stately old Mar^chale de Luxembourg, 
oracle of petits-soupers as she was, must not for 
a moment be mistaken for our respectable and 
never-too-much-to-be-honoured Mrs. Grundy. 
And it is with a due respect for the awful nominis 
umbra, who is supposed to sit in eternal judg- 
ment over our popular propriety, that we select 
the following from amongst the lighter examples 
in this way. In their house in the Rue St. Do- 
minique, M. and Madame de Genlis kept an 
Italian abbd, who read Tasso with the lady, and 
was in addition an excellent musician. The 
poor fellow was taken ill with cholera, and died 
suddenly one evening at ten o'clock. Madame 
de Genlis, who had been present at his death- 
bed, was so struck with his face, that she de- 
clares she will not sleep under the same roof 
with the corpse. Forthwith the horses are put 
to and she goes off to sleep at Madame de 
Balincour's, where the gentleman gave up his 
room to her. At half-past twelve she retired to 
rest. In a few minutes she fell asleep, but was 



Madame de Genlis. 147 

presently awakened by the entrance of M. de 
Balincour, '^ bon vieillard fort spirituel,'' sing- 
ing a little song in a merry voice, whilst a low 
whispering betokened that there were five or six 
persons in the room. This was the little song 
to the air of ^^ La Baronne : " — 

" Dans mon alcdve 
Je m'arrackerai les cheveux ; (bis) 
Je se?ts que je deviendrai chauve 
Sije fi'obtiens ce queje vetix 

Dans 771 on alcove" 

To which Madame la Comtesse, nothing dis- 
concerted, replied after a moment's silence with 
the following impromptu to the same tune. It 
so happened, fortunately for her, that the hon 
vieillard was almost bald : — 

** Dans voire alcove 
Moderez Vardeiir de vos feiix ; (bis) 
Car J enjin, pottr devenir chauve 
II faudrait avoir des cheveux 
Dans voire alcdve P 

The answer, of course, caused a general laugh, 
and had " the most brilliant success." Lights 
are brought in, the ladies of the family sit upon 
the bed, the gentlemen make a circle round it, 
and the lively company talk of a thousand things 
until three in the morning, when M. de Balin- 
cour goes out, returning almost immediately 
dressed as a pastry-cook, bearing an immense 



148 Four Frenchwomen. 

basket of sweetmeats, preserves, and fruits. 
This prolongs the entertainment until five, for 
the merry gentleman detains them more than 
half-an-hour in proposing all kinds of amuse- 
ments, as violins, magic-lanterns, and puppet- 
shows, and when at last Madame la Comtesse 
is allowed to sleep, she is awakened again at 
twelve by the new frolics of the bon vieillard. 
M. de Genlis, appearing to claim his wife, is 
detained forcibly, and for the next five days 
there is nothing but acting of parts, ballets, 
balls, theatres, concerts, fairs, songs^ and games 

— in fact, " the noisiest five days that she ever 
passed," 

Up to the year 1770, they, or rather she — 
for the absences of her husband were frequent 

— had lived principally with Madame de Pui- 
sieux. In 1770, after some months spent in re- 
tirement with this lady, who was mourning the 
death of her husband, Madame de Genlis left 
her entirely to enter the Palais Royal as lady-in- 
waiting to Madame la Duchesse de Chartres, in 
whom we recognise the somewhat sentimental 
and romantic Mademoiselle de Bourbon who 
was the friend of Marie de Lamballe. M. de 
Genlis, in the meantime, had obtained an ap- 
pointment as captain of the duke's guards. The 
duchess seems (at first) to have taken a great 



Madame de Genlis, 149 

liking to her new attendant, who obligingly 
teaches her to spell, a kindly office which she 
had already performed for Madame la Marquise 
de Genlis. Our space will not permit us to 
linger over her portraits of the notabilities of the 
Palais Royal, which strove with the Temple 
(the palace of the Prince de Conti) for the first 
place among the salons of Paris. Whilst hasten- 
ing to the next important epoch in her life (in 
1776), we may note that she had already visited 
Holland, Italy, Switzerland, and some parts of 
Germany. To England she had not yet come. 
Her experiences of Rousseau and Voltaire, whom 
she knew and visited during this time, will be 
given in the succeeding section. Just one more 
extract and we have done with the frivolous — 
it were juster, perhaps, to say the most frivolous 
— portion of the Memoirs. This little incident 
of the Porcherons Is a last example of the morbid 
desire for excitement which led the great world 
to envy even the coarse sallies and "vigorous 
dancing " of the guinguettes — of the universal 
taste for travesties and disguises, which prompted 
even rigorous Madame Roland to ride off on 
donkey-back en cuisinUre — with arm akimbo 
and air of gaping thickwittedness — after her 
cousin Trude. For the better appreciation of 
the performance we subjoin a list of the — 



150 Four Frenchwomen, 

Madame la Comtesse de Potocka. 

{A Polish lady of rank.) 

Madame la Comtesse de Genlis. 

[Lady-in- Waiting to the Duchess of Chartres.) 

Madame la Baronne d'Andlau. 

{Mother to the above — over fifty.) 

M. de Maisonneuve. 
{Chamberlain to King Stanislas of Poland.) 

M. de Genlis. 
( Captain of Guards to the Duke of Chartres^ 

M. GiLLIER. 

( Ci-devant Major in an East Indian Regiment — fifty- ) 
Scene — The " Great Conqueror " of the Porcherons. 

The Madame de Potocka in question had made 
the acquaintance of Madame de Genlis at Aix- 
la-Chapelle, and had been " doing " Paris under 
her auspices. As yet they had not explored the 
^uinguettes — taverns outside the barriers — tea- 
gardens, in fact^ where tea was unknown, and 
M. de Genlis had proposed to take them to the 
most noted house of the kind. The ladies were 
to go as cooks, MM. de Maisonneuve and 
Genlis as servants in livery. 

" The next day," she says, " I was supping 
at the Palais Royal with Madame de Potocka. 
On this particular evening she was splendidly 
dressed in a gold robe, and wearing an enor- 
mous quantity of diamonds. At eleven M. de 



Madame de Genlis. 151 

Genlis came up to her very gravely, and reminded 
her that it was time to get ready to go to the 
Porcherons. This notification — addressed as 
it v^as to the most majestic figure I have ever 
seen in my life — made me burst with laughter. 
We went upstairs to dress, which we did in my 
mother's room, as she had gone to bed, and 
wished to see our costumes. Madame de Po- 
tocka's noble and stately figure was somewhat 
coarse, and needed setting off. In her disguise 
she lost all her dignity, and when she had got 
on her jacket, red handkerchief, round cap, and 
check apron, she looked for all the world like a 
genuine cook, whilst I, on the contrary, in similar 
costume, lost nothing of my elegant and distin- 
guished air, and was even more remarkable than 
if I had been tastefully dressed. M. de Maison- 
neuve had sent an excuse in the morning, so, as 
we needed two men, we took M. Gillier, and set 
off in a hackney coach at about half-past eleven. 
I had the greatest success at the ' Great Con- 
queror,' where there was a numerous company, 
and vanquished, at first sight, the runner of M. 
le Marquis de Brancas, who, waiting upon his 
master, must have seen me twenty times at table, 
but did not in the least recognise me. The 
dress, which made Madame de Potocka look 
considerably older, made me some ten or twelve 



152 Four Frenchwomen, 

years younger ; I looked sixteen or seventeen 
at the most ; and we acted our parts so well that 
no one had the least suspicion of our being in 
disguise. I began by dancing a minuet with the 
runner, with the most countrified air in the world, 
and afterwards a quadrille. In the meantime M. 
Gillier ordered some pigeons a la crapaudine " 
[flattened and broiled], " with a salad, for our 
refreshment. We sat down together at a little 
table, where the gaiety and gallantry of M. de 
Genlis, divided between Madame de Potocka 
and myself, delighted us exceedingly. There 
was always something so original and agreeable, 
and, at the same time, so witty in his pleasantry, 
that he would have amused the most morbid of 
mortals. 

" A finishing stroke, however, was put to our 
merriment by a most unexpected occurrence. 
It was customary to enter the guinguette singing, 
and presently we heard some one bawling at the 
top of his voice, — 

' Lison dormait dans ten bocage 
Un bras par-ci, un bras par-la^ etc. 

** Looking towards the door, we saw two per- 
sons come in singing and dancing, one dressed 
as a servant-girl, the other in one of my liveries. 
I knew them in an instant, and jumping up, 
flung myself upon the servant's neck, for it was 



Madame de Genlis, 153 

no other than my mother leaning upon the arm 
of M. de Maisonneuve. She had contrived this 
little trick with him, and for this reason he had 
excused himself. Our joy and gratitude were 
unbounded, and there really was a good deal of 
grace and goodness in this jest of a person as old 
as my mother was. She sat down at our table 
with her companion, and she and M. de Genlis 
were the life and soul of the evening — one of 
the gayest and most charming that I ever passed 
in my life. I had never laughed so much since 
the Genlis and Sillery days, and it was three in the 
morning before we tore ourselves away from the 
* Great Conqueror' of the Porcherons." 



V. 

With the exception of her acquaintanceship 
with M. de Sauvigny, Madame de Genlis does 
not appear to have formed any literary connection 
of lasting importance previous to her entry of 
Belle Chasse. Her more-than-friendship with 
the "flower of pedants," La Harpe, belongs 
properly to the subsequent period. D'Alembert 
she had seen before her marriage ; he had come 
to hear her harp-playing in the Rue Neuve St. 
Paul, but she " disliked him extremely." *' He 



154 Pour Frenchwomen. 

had a vulgar expression of face," she said, '' and 
told coarse comical anecdotes in a shrill tone 
of voice." Of Raynal, Marie de Corday's 
'' master," v^^ho visited at Madame de Puisieux's, 
she has left a slight sketch, also en noir. As a 
child she had heard Marmontel read his tales. 
Something, too, she had seen of the playwright 
and librettist, Sedaine, v^hose flame yet flickers 
in the ^' Gageure Imprivue'' and the ^^ Philosophe 
sans le savolr ; " musketeer Dorat had written 
her some pretty complimentary verses ; Delille 
had read part of his jEneid to her, and she had 
met Gibbon and Buffon, She had visited Vol- 
taire and known Rousseau, and, as in duty 
bound, she has left lengthy accounts of her 
experiences. 

Her short friendship with " Minerva's owl," 
as Madame de Mirepoix called Rousseau, is 
thoroughly characteristic both of himself and 
Madame la Comtesse. He was then at Paris, 
morbid as ever, neither making nor receiving 
visits, and, if we may believe her recollections, 
gaining a scanty subsistence (as he had done 
before) by copying music, Madame de Genlis 
had not yet read his works, and admired him 
chiefly for his opera, the Ddvin du Village. 
One day M. de Sauvigny told her in confidence 
that her husband was about to play her a trick — • 



Rousseau. 



Madame de Genlis, 155 

in other words to pass off Pr^ville, the Foote of 
the French stage, the actor whom Sterne calls 
" Mercury himself," as the author of Emile, and 
the lady promised to appear the dupe of this so- 
called '^mystification," a jery popular, and often 
very unworthy, amusement of the day. 

''A Crispin en philosophe ! — the idea was 
delightful. Unhappily, M. de Genlis forgot 
his scheme, and some three weeks afterwards 
brought Simon Pure himself to visit his wife. 
Of course she was delighted. The little man 
who appeared to her, with his round wig and his 
marron-coloured stockings, his very coat and 
attitudes, presented the most perfect take-off to 
her appreciative eyes. Moreover, as it was 
only Preville, there was not the least necessity 
for any ceremony. So she sang the airs of the 
Ddvin, laughed, played, talked of everything 
that came into her head — in short, was unusu- 
ally genuine and delightful, and, to the eyes of 
her astonished husband, excessively eccentric, 
to say the least of it. Rousseau, quite unaccus- 
tomed to such charming freshness and simplicity, 
was so pleased that he actually promised to dine 
with them next day. Of course when he was 
gone there was naturally a full explanation, and 
extreme confusion, perhaps vexation, upon the 
part of the lady when she discovered her mis- 



156 Four Frenchwomen. 

take. However, no harm was done ; the matter 
was kept a secret, and the — for once — unsus- 
pecting Rousseau told M. de Sauvigny that he 
considered the young countess to be a jeune per- 
Sonne " the most unaffected, cheerful, and devoid 
of pretensions he had ever met with," 

For the lady, she never knew " a less impos- 
ing or more kindly man of letters. He spoke 
simply of himself, and without bitterness of his 
enemies." He did full justice to the talents of 
Voltaire, but added that pride and flatteries had 
spoiled him. He had already read some of his 
Confessions to Madame d'Egmont, but he con- 
sidered that our countess was far too young for 
such a confidence. She had not yet read Emile ; 
she would do well to do so when she was older, 
he said. His works, indeed, he mentioned fre- 
quently. He had written all the letters of Jw/ie 
on fancy note-paper with vignettes, he told them, 
then folded them, and read and re-read them in 
his walks, as if he had really received them from 
his mistress. " He had most piercing eyes, and 
a delightful smile, full oi finesse and sweetness." 

An acquaintance with Rousseau, however, 
could not endure for ever. For five months he 
dined with them nearly every day. He was 
very gay and communicative, and she discovered 
in him neither susceptibility nor caprice. At 



Madame de Genlis, 157 

last, as ill-fortune would have it, he praised some 
Sillery that he had tasted, and expressed a will- 
ingness to receive a couple of bottles. M. de 
Genlis courteously forwarded a case of five-and- 
twenty. Rousseau's morbid hatred of patronage 
took the alarm instanter. Back came the case 
with a laconic epistle breathing flames and fury, 
and renouncing the donors for ever. But this 
time the countess wrote an apologetic letter, 
and managed adroitly to patch up the wound. 
On the next occasion she was not so successful. 
She had managed to persuade him to accompany 
her to the first representation of M. de Sauvigny's 
Persiffteur. He had a great dislike to being 
seen ; but she had procured a grated box with a 
private entry. Upon reaching the theatre he 
objected to the closing of the grate, and his 
presence was, in consequence, soon discovered 
by the house, who afterwards forgot him for the 
piece. To the astonishment of his companions, 
he grew frightfully sombre, refused to return to 
supper with them, or to listen to their protesta- 
tions, and the next day declared he would never 
see them as long as he lived, for they had ex- 
hibited him like a wild beast. This time the 
case was hopeless, and although the lady was 
able at a later period to render him some small 
service, she felt no desire for any further inti- 



158 Four Frenchwomen. 

macy with the sensitive philosopher of the Rue 
Platriere. 

Of Voltaire she can only say, Vidi tantum. 
In 1776, she was travelling for her health under 
the escort of M. Gillier and a German painter 
of the name of Ott. Being at Geneva, she wrote 
for permission to visit Voltaire at Ferney, and 
received a most gracious reply. He would re- 
sign his dressing-gown and slippers in her favour, 
he answered, and invited her to dinner and 
supper. It was the custom (she says) for his 
visitors, especially the younger ladies, to pale, 
and stammer, and even faint upon their presen- 
tation to the great man ; this^ in fact, was the 
etiquette of the Ferney court. Madame la 
Comtesse, although unwilling to be pathetic, 
determined at least to put aside her habitual sim- 
plicity, to be less reserved, and, above all, less 
silent. 

With her she took M. Ott, who had never 
read a line of the author, but was, nevertheless, 
overflowing with the requisite enthusiasm. They 
passed on their way the church which he had 
built, with its superscription of '' Voltaire d. 
Dim,'' which made her shudder. They arrived 
three-quarters of an hour too soon, but she 
piously consoled herself by thinking that she had 
possibly prevented the penning of a few addi- 



Madame de Genlts, 159 

tional blasphemies. In the antechamber they 
discovered a Correggio, whilst occupying the 
place of honour in the drawing-room was a veri- 
table signboard, upon which Voltaire was repre- 
sented as a victorious archangel trampling his 
grovelling Pompignans and Frerons under his 
feet. They were received by Madame Denis 
(the heroine of that unseemly and unfortunate 
flight from the great Frederick) and Madame 
de St. Julien, who told them that Voltaire would 
shortly appear. In the interim Madame de St. 
Julien took her for a ramble, very much to the 
detriment of an elaborate toilette, which she 
confesses she had not neglected. Indeed, when 
at last she hears that the great man is ready to 
receive her, a passing glance in the glass assures 
her, to her complete discomforture, that she pre- 
sents an utterly tumbled and pitiable appearance. 
Madame de St. Julien had advised her to sa- 
lute Voltaire, adding that he would certainly be 
pleased. But he took her hand and kissed it, 
which act of respect was quite sufficient to make 
her embrace him with great good will. M. Ott 
was almost transported to tears upon his in- 
troduction. He produced some miniatures of 
sacred subjects, which immediately drew from 
M. de Voltaire a few critical remarks which were 
highly offensive to his rigorous lady visitor. At 



1 60 Four Frenchwomen. 

dinner, she says, he seemed anything but amia- 
ble, appearing to be always in a passion with 
the servants, and calling to them at the top of 
his voice, which was, however, one of his habits 
of which she had already been warned. After 
dinner Madame Denis played to them upon the 
harpsichord in an old-fashioned style which car- 
ried her auditress back to the reign of Louis 
XIV., and after that their host took them for 
a drive in his berline. Madame la Comtesse 
shall finish in her own words : — 

" He took us into the village [of Ferney] to 
see the houses he had built and the benevolent 
institutions that he had established. He is 
greater there than in his books, for one sees 
everywhere a well-directed goodness of heart, 
and one can hardly conceive that the same hand 
which wrote so many impious, false, and wicked 
things, should have performed such useful, wise, 
and noble actions. He showed the village to 
every stranger who came to visit him, but he 
did It unaffectedly, spoke with the utmost sim- 
plicity and good feeling on the subject, ac 
quainted us with everything that he had done, 
without the least appearance of boasting, and I 
know no one who could do as much. When 
w^e got back to the chMeau the conversation 
was very lively ; we talked with great interest 



Madame de Genlis. i6i 

of all that we had seen. I did not leave till 

night-time. . . . 

' ' All the busts and portraits of him " [and they 
may be numbered by hundreds] " are very lilie, 
but no artist has ever rendered his eyes. I ex- 
pected to find them brilliant and full of fire, and 
they were certainly the liveliest I ever saw, but 
they had something unspeakably ' velvety ' and 
sweet about them. The whole soul of Zaire lay in 
those eyes of his. His smile and his extremely 
malicious laugh entirely altered this charming 
expression of the face. He was greatly broken, 
and an old-fashioned manner of dressing made 
him look older still. He had a sepulchral voice, 
which had a most curious effect, particularly as 
he had a habit of talking very loud, although he 
was not deaf. When neither religion nor his 
enemies were discussed, his conversation was 
simple, natural, and unpretentious, and conse- 
quently, with such wit and talent as he pos- 
sessed, perfectly delightful. It seemed to me 
that he could not bear that any one should have, 
on any point, a different opinion from his own, 
and when opposed in the slightest degree his 
manner became bitter and cutting. He had 
certainly lost much of the politeness which he 
should have had, but this was quite natural. 
Since he has lived here people only visit him 



1 62 Four Frenchwomen, 

to praise him to the skies, his decisions are 
oracles, every one about him is at his feet, he 
hears of nothing but the admiration that he in- 
spires, and the most ridiculous exaggerations 
only appear to him as ordinary homages." . . . 

While at Zurich (we carefully follow her in 
omitting the date, although it was possibly about 
this time) she made an expedition to the country 
house of a now half-forgotten idyllist and land- 
scape-painter, whose dust-crowned Death of Abel 
may now and then be discovered in a neglected 
corner of the book-case hiding under cover of 
Klopstock's Messiah — Solomon Gessner. 

His First Navigator (which Gardel, by the 
way, had turned into a ballet) is, he tells her, 
his favourite work, for he had composed it for 
his wife in the commencement of their court- 
ship. 

" I had a great curiosity to make the acquaint- 
ance of the lady whom he had married for love, 
and who had made him a poet. I pictured her 
to myself as a charming herghre, and I expected 
that Gessner's house would be an elegant thatched 
cottage^ surrounded by shrubberies and flowers, 
where nothing was drunk but milk, and where, 
to use the German expression, every one walked 
on roses. But when I arrived there I crossed 
a little garden filled with cabbages and carrots, 



Madame de Genlis, 163 

that began somewhat to discompose my dream- 
ings of eclogues and idyls, which were entirely 
upset, on entering the room, by a positive cloud 
of tobacco-smoke, through which I dimly per- 
ceived Gessner drinking beer and pulling at his 
pipe by the side of a good lady in a jacket and 
cap who was placidly knitting — it was Madame 
Gessner. But the good-natured greeting of the 
husband and wife, their perfect union, their ten- 
derness for their children, and their simplicity, 
recall to mind the manners and the virtues which 
the poet has sung ; it is always an idyl and the 
golden age, not indeed in splendid sounding 
verse, but in simple and unadorned language. 
Gessner draws and paints landscape in water- 
colour after a superior fashion ; he has sketched 
all the sites that he has described in his poems. 
He gave me a beautiful sketch that he had 
done." 

Rousseau in his self-imposed misery at Paris, 
Voltaire in his court at Ferney, and this simple 
poet and landscape-painter among his cabbages 
and carrots, are pictures curiously contrasted. 
Were it not for want of space, we might have 
been betrayed into a moral — *' d notre manidre," 



164 Pour Frenchwomen, 



VI. 

" We must represent to ourselves all fashiona- 
ble female Europe, at this time," says Thacke- 
ray, speaking, parenthetically, of the beautiful 
Lady Coventry, whose death was hastened by 
immoderate painting, " as plastered with white, 
and raddled with red." The next occurrence 
in the life of Madame la Comtesse to which 
we can assign a bond-fide date concerns this 
popular custom. On the 25th of January, 1776, 
/ she left off rouge. The resignation had a grave 
I significance in those days. It implied the giv- 
' ing up of pretentions to youth, and pomps and 
vanities generally ; and was, in fact, a polite 
" notice to friends " that the quondam illumina- 
tor was about to betake herself to the half-lights 
and the sad-coloured raiment which announced 
the devote. Our heroine laments rather comi- 
cally that " having always had religious senti- 
ments, it is singular that many of her sacrifices 
in this way should have had, nevertheless, a 
merely mundane origin," for it appears that the 
present step, in spite of its importance, was 
^rather the result of an accident than a conscien- 
tious abnegation of her personal advantages. 
Eight years before, at Villers-Cotterets, the 



Madame de Genlis. 165 

talk happening to turn upon some elderly ladies 
who still clung to the carnations of the Rue St. 
Honore, Madame de Genlis had said that she 
could not understand how the quitting of rouge 
could possibly be a sacrifice. This inconceiva- 
ble statement being questioned, she declared 
that she would leave it off at thirty. M. de 
Chartres politely pooh-poohed her decision, and 
she consequently bet him a discretion — a wager 
in which no sum or article is named — that she 
would perform her promise. She did so, as we 
have said, and this is the way in which the affair 
was fully completed : — 

" Some fifteen days before my birthday, I 
begged M. de Chartres to remember my discrd- 
lion, and on the 25th of January I discovered in 
my room a doll as large as life seated at my 
desk, pen in hand, and wearing a head-dress 
of millions [ I ] of quills. Upon one side of 
the desk was a ream of splendid paper, and 
upon the other thirty-two blank octavo books, 
bound in green morocco, with twenty-four 
smaller ones which were bound in red. At 
the feet of the figure lay a case filled with note- 
paper, letter-covers, sealing-wax, gold and silver 
powder, knife, scissors, rule, compass, etc., etc. 
I was charmed with my . present, and I have 
never since worn rouge." 



1 66 Four Frenchwomen. 

Long before, she says, it had been agreed 
privately between herself and the Duchess of 
Chartres that if the duchess had a daughter, 
Madame de Genlis should be her governess. 
According to the prevailing practice, the prin- 
cesses of the blood had been hitherto brought 
up by an under-governor, who took charge of 
them up to the age of fourteen or fifteen. Ma- 
dame la Comtesse, justly deciding that this — 
looking to the value of first impressions — was 
too precious an interval to be lost, had declared 
her intention of taking them from their earliest 
years, and had, moreover, determined to retire 
with them into a convent. When, in August, 
1777, the duchess became the mother of twins, 
they were temporarily confided to the care of 
Madame de Rochambeau, and, in pursuance of 
the above-mentioned arrangement^ a pavilion 
was built in the neighbouring convent of Belle 
Chasse, which the countess finally entered with 
her charges. 

The pavilion in question lay in the centre of 
the garden of the convent, with which it was 
connected by a trellised colonnade overhung 
with vines. She seems to have at once con- 
ceived a definite idea of her duties, and to 
have carried it out consistently to the end. 
The household was ordered with the strictesf 



Madame de Gen lis, 167 

economy, the furniture was simple, and more 
useful than ornamental. " I endeavoured," she 
says, " to make even the furniture subserve to 
my scheme of education." With this view the 
walls were painted with medallions of all the 
Roman emperors, carefully dated, the fire- 
screens exposed the kings of France, while, 
for convenience of reference, the hand-screens 
were devoted to the gods and goddesses. Ge- 
ography was remanded to the stairs, the maps 
of the south lying at the bottom, and those of 
the north at the top, so that the pleased ob- 
server starting from " the palms and temples " 
of the lowest step, slipped through "eternal 
summer " somewhere in the middle of the flight, 
and discovered the " North- West Passage" at 
the summit. Over the doors, again, were scenes 
from Roman history ; over the grating, in letters 
of gold, was a sentence from the Spectator, 
"True happiness is of a retired nature, and an 
enemy to pomp and noise." In all this we re- 
cognise the heroine of St. Aubin and Sillery — 
but she is at her best. 

She had soon almost a school. Besides Mile. 
Adelaide d'Orleans, whose twin-sister died at 
five, her own daughters, Caroline and Pulcherie, 
lived with her. In the first year of her residence 
at the convent she received a niece, Henriette de 



1 68 Four Frenchwomen, 

Sercey, later a nephew, Cesar, and "a little Eng- 
lish girl, the celebrated Pamela." Of Pamela 
the world will probably never know more than 
Madame la Comtesse has chosen to tell. She 
was sent from England — the story goes — in 
accordance with the duke's request, in order to 
help to perfect his children in the English lan- 
guage. " Her name was Nancy Syms ; I called 
her Pamela ; she did not know a word of French, 
and in playing with the little princesses she con- 
tributed greatly to familiarise them with the 
English language." In 1782, the duke, to the 
great disgust of Palais Royal place-hunters, 
boldly made Madame de Genlis Governor of his 
three sons, the Duke of Valois (Louis Philippe), 
then nine, the Duke of Montpensier, seven, and 
the little Count of Beaujolais, who was about 
three years old. She gave them a thoroughly 
practical education. The princes rose at seven, 
had lessons with their masters in Latin and arith- 
metic until eleven, at which time they came to 
their Governor, with whom they remained until 
ten, when the convent was closed. She gave 
them masters in botany, chemistry, and drawing 
— she invented a historical magic-lantern, the 
slides of which were painted with scenes from 
*' sacred, ancient, and Roman history, together 
with that of China and Japan." She was the 



Madame de Genlis, 169 

first governor, she says, who taught languages 
by conversation — her pupils took their morning 
walk in German, they dined in English, and they 
supped in Italian. 

When she received the princes the duke had 
promised to buy them a country house. He 
bought the estate of St. Leu, where they spent 
eight months of the year. Here they gardened, 
botanised, and practised chemistry. - Their Gov- 
ernor, mindful of her old tastes, made them 
act voyages in the park (notably those of Vasco 
de Gama and Snelgrave), which were arranged 
dramatically from La Harpe's abridgement of 
Prev6t's collection, and in these performances 
the whole establishment took part. In the great 
dining-room they had historical tableaux, which 
David often grouped for them ; a theatre was 
built in which they acted all the pieces out of 
the ThMtre d' Education. In the winter the 
indefatigable instructress taught them to make 
portfolios, ribbons, wigs, pasteboard-work, 
marble-paper, and artificial flowers ; to gild, to 
turn, and to carpenter generally. The Duke of 
Valois in particular was an excellent joiner. 
When they went out it was still in pursuit of 
instruction : they visited museums and manufac- 
tories which they had coached up in the Ency- 
clopddie, thereby giving their Governor an oppor- 



I/O Four Frenchwomen, 

tunity of declaring that the descriptions in that 
valuable work are often faulty. On the whole, 
this practico-historico-histrionical education, as 
it would then have been described, seems to 
have worked successfully. At worst it was a 
decided advance upon the former system. The 
pupils were happy and pleased with their teacher 
— she herself " led a delicious life at Belle 
Chasse." Its chief fault, as many critics have 
already pointed out, seems to have been that an 
education so universal must of necessity be 
superficial, and that a life so fruitful in facts 
could have left but little room for the develop- 
ment of natural impulses, or the growth of those 
mere flowers of fancy and of life that neither toil 
nor spin. 

One does not easily recognise the cook-maid 
of the Porcherons, or the mistress of the revels 
at Vaudreuil, in this energetic and indefatigable 
preceptress of the convent at Belle Chasse. In 
those old dialogues of Passy and Origny, dia- 
logues which she continues now as ever, we 
heard her vaunting her shadowy interlocutor and 
imaginary counsellor as far superior to that 
" faithful admonition of a friend," most needful, 
one would imagine, to a mind like hers, " ever 
infused and drenched," as Bacon says, " in its 
affections and customs." " My (imaginary) 



Madame de Genlis. 171 

friend," she says, "interrupted or interrogated 
me ; her surprise, her admiration, and her eulo- 
gies enchanted me. , . . What human friend 
can enter into our sentiments, can love us, can 
- understand us so well as the fictitious one whom 
we create for ourselves ? " 

Yet in the extracts from the journals of the 
education of her pupils we find her penning such 
words as these : — 

*' You will know your friends — if they never 
flatter you ; if they give you salutary advice at 
the risk of displeasing you for the moment. . . . 
If you meet with friends worthy of you, you are 
bound to render them all the services you can 
perform, without being unjust to others. . . . 
You ought not to suffer any one of your friends 
to be accused of any offence against yourself 
without proofs, especially to your private ear. 
Distrust every one who attempts to give you a 
bad opinion of your friends ; envy is almost 
always the motive of these informations, and 
when they are not supported by positive proofs 
you ought to despise them, and impose silence 
by an air of coldness and of complete incredulity 
upon those who are the informers." If proofs 
are adduced, " before taking any decided step 
you ought to have a clear and frank explanation 
with your friend, for it is only thus that he 



1^2 Four Frenchwomen, 

can justify himself, and you would yourself be 
blamable if you did not furnish him all the means 
in your power for doing so." 

Is Madame la Comtesse writing from convic- 
tion ? or is she romancing en pMagogue — just 
discharging the last coachful of second-hand 
moralities ? We cannot pretend to decide. The 
sounds which we strike out of this "harp of 
thousand strings " of ours are often discordant 
and contradictory enough, and even our moralist, 
good harpist as she was, could not make her life 
harmonious. At least, the extracts show that 
the Governor, dating from the class-room, could 
write nobly enough of friends. Yet it is one of 
the saddest things of these Memoirs that she 
never seems to have had a dear or worthy friend. 
Secure in her self-reliance, she grew old in all 
those faults which the "faithful admonition" 
would have mitigated or corrected. 

At Belle Chasse she married both her daugh- 
ters — the elder to a Belgian nobleman, M. 
Becelaer de Lawoestine, the younger to a M. de 
Valence. At Belle Chasse, too, she acquired 
both her credit and discredit as an author. In 
1779-80 she published, under the title of ThMtre 
d' Education, some little dramatic pieces for the 
benefit of three officers who had been sentenced 
to a fine or imprisonment for life. The public 



Madame de Genlis. 173 

cation, under such circumstance, of these little 
moral comedies, which, like Mr. Pitt's early 
tragedy, had no love in them, '' succeeded," she 
writes to Gibbon, " beyond all her hopes." 
Already, when, in the winter of 1777 and 1778, 
her daughters had played them at the Palais 
Royal, they had gained for their authoress the 
approbation of the King-Critic, La Harpe, who, 
in his complimentary verses, "adored, at once, 
the author, the work, and the actresses." 

" He became so passionately attached to me," 
she afterwards says, "that I was obliged seri- 
ously to restrain his enthusiasm." The affair 
turned out in the " grand style." M. de La 
Harpe went away to Lyons to cure his com- 
plaint, and happily for his peace, returned heart- 
whole. After this wind-up " in the grand style," 
however, the matter appears to have ended in 
the little style — by a literary quarrel. 

" We have here," says Franklin, writing from 
Passy, in 1782, to Mrs. Hewson, "a female 
writer on education, who has lately published 
three volumes, which are much talked of. . . . 
They are much praised and censured." The 
work referred to was Addle et Thdodore, or Lettres 
sur rEducation, her most important effort, and 
one which procured her, she says, at once " the 
suffrages of the public, and the irreconcilable 



174 Po^^^ Frenchwomen, 

hatred of all the so-called philosophers and their 
partisans." Indeed, the satire of reigning follies, 
the less defensible portraiture of individuals (of 
which she was accused), and above all, her open 
opposition to the powerful contemporary phi- 
losophy, was not calculated to conciliate the 
reigning powers in literature, or to acquire her 
crowds of friends. AdHe et TModore was fol- 
lowed, in 1784, by the VeilUes du Chateau, in 
which she pursued the same uncompromising 
course, and yet appears to have been greatly 
disgusted by the award of the Monthyon prize 
to Madame d'Epinay for the second volume of 
the Conversations d'Emilie. Our authoress, of 
course, ascribes this blow to her enemies of the 
Encyclopidie. " Madame d'Epinay was a phi- 
losopher, and took good care not to talk of re- 
ligion to her Emily." Her work in 1787, On 
Religion considered as the only sure Foundation 
of Happiness and of true Philosophy, which she 
wrote for the first communion of the Duke of 
Valois, put the finishing stroke to her reputation 
as a Mbre de UEglise, and opponent of liberty of 
conscience. Her position was not an enviable 
one. The Palais Royal place-hunters hated her, 
her political opponents hated her, and the phi- 
losophers hated her. She seems to have lived 
through a hail of epigrams, of many of which 



Madame de Genlis, 175 

only readers of the Actes des Apotres can con- 
ceive the obscenity. The wits found out the 
unfortunate similitude between her favourite in- 
strument and her critic-lover, and christened her 
works Les CEuvres de la Harpe. Rivarol de- 
clared that '' she had no sex " — " that Heaven 
had refused the magic of talent to her produc- 
tions as it had refused the charm of innocence 
to her childhood." They caricatured her armed 
with a rod and a stick of barley-sugar, and 
finally, turning from the preceptress to the 
pietist, they wrote, — 

« Noailles et Sillery, ces mires de VEglise, 
Voiidraient gagner le parlemenf ; 
Soit qu'on les voie, ou qn'on les Use 

Par malheur on devient aussitdt Protestant.^* 

We do not pretend to admire Madame de 
Genlis, nor is there evidence to rehabilitate her 
if one would. Yet, in appending here her por- 
trait as it has at this time been drawn, it is but 
fair to remind the reader that it is from the pen 
of a friend of the Duchess of Chartres, and 
consequently of an opponent to the countess. 
" I did not like her," says the Baroness d'Ober- 
kirch, in her Memoirs, ''spite of her accom- 
plishments and the charm of her conversation ; 
she was too systematic : she is a woman who 
has laid aside the flowing robes of her sex for 



176 Four Frenchwomen. 

the cap and gown " [we permit ourselves to , 
change the term] '^of a pedagogue. Besides, 
nothing about her is natural. She is con- 
stantly in an attitude, as it were, thinking 
that her portrait, moral or physical, is being 
taken. She attaches too much importance to 
her celebrity — she thinks too much'of her own 
opinions. One of the great follies of this mas- 
culine woman is her harp ; she carries it about 
with her. She speaks of it when it is not near 
— she plays upon a crust of bread, and practises 
with a piece of packthread. When she perceives 
that any one is looking at her, she rounds her 
arm, pinches up her mouth, assumes a senti- 
mental look and attitude, and begins to move 
her fingers." ... At a party at Madame de 
Massais' she " sat in the centre of the assembly, 
sang, talked, commanded, commented, and ended 
by putting the entire concert into confusion. 
Most certainly the young Princes of Orleans 
have a most singular Governor, who is ever act- 
ing the tutor, and who never forgets her r6le but 
when she ought most to remember it." Madame 
la Comtesse has left us no portrait of Madame 
la Baronne. 



Madame de Genii s, 177 



VII. 



Madame de Genlis had long been meditat- 
ing a descent upon England. Already some 
years before Gibbon had been charged to pro- 
cure her lodgings at London. But she had not 
been able to carry out her intention, and had 
consoled herself by making the acquaintance of 
some of our best authors. " I now know Eng- 
lish perfectly," she informs him, in one of the 
letters which he apparently never had the civility 
to answer, and the statement is confirmed by 
Miss Burney, who tells the king that she ex- 
pressed herself in the language very readily, and 
with exceeding ease. " As a proof," she goes 
on to Gibbon, " I read Shakespeare with the 
greatest facility ; but my favourite poet is 
Milton, whom I like so well as to know a con- 
siderable portion of Paradise Lost by heart. I 
also know a good many verses of Pope ; but 
I should make you laugh if you heard me read 
them." For a Frenchwoman of her time her 
knowledge of English literature was, in truth, 
very extensive. With our dramatic authors in 
particular she seems to have been thoroughly 
conversant, for she plodded through them all 



178 Four Frenchwomen, 

from Shakespeare and Ben Jonson downwards 
during her residence at Bury. A propos of our 
comedies, she told Miss Burney that no woman 
ought to go and see them ; and, indeed, the 
calm student of Farquhar's Trip to the Jubilee, 
or Congreve's Love for Love — plays which the 
prudish Evelinas and Cecilias went to see with 
their impossible Lord Orvilles — can hardly fail 
to wonder that the rigorous and respectable com- 
pany were " perpetually out of countenance " at 
their extreme indelicacy. 

At last, in 1785, she left her pupils at St. Leu, 
and *' in the pleasant month of June" a soft 
Etesian gale wafted over the illustrious visitor to 
our hospitable shores. The trip, her record tells 
us, was "exceedingly brilliant." The public 
prints teamed with the most obliging notices, 
and the most complimentary verses, amongst the 
rest an ode by Hayley. At one of the theatres 
(she says) Hamlet was performed in her honour; 
Lord Inchiquin took her to the House of Com- 
mons. By desire of the Prince of Wales, Lord 
William Gordon entertained her at his house, 
and the " First Gentleman in Europe " " paid 
great attention " to the illustrious adviser of 
Philippe Egalitd. Burke invited her to his 
country seat, and afterwards carried her to 
Oxford. While with him she made the acquaint- 



Madame de Genlis, 179 

ance of the '' Chevalier Reinolds," as she calls 
him, who " shifted his trumpet aad only took 
snuff " when the enthusiastic lady talked to him 
of her art achievements. Here, too, she met 
Windham, whose published Diary, however, 
contains nothing very important about her. The 
queen, to whom she had hitherto forwarded 
copies of her works, gave her a private audience ; 
Lord Mansfield, then over eighty years of age, 
asked permission to visit her, and presented her 
with a moss-rose tree, which she claims to have first 
introduced into France. She made an excursion 
to Blenheim, where the Duchess of Marlborough 
finding out by the lodge-book how celebrated a 
lady had left her grounds, sent a servant after 
her with a present of pine-apples. She offered 
the man a guinea, which he refused, saying, 
'^ Madame, I cannot accept it — I am a French- 
man." Another visit was paid to the son-in-law 
of Richardson, who (she says) offered her a MS. 
copy of Pamela, corrected by the author him- 
self, upon the condition that she would translate 
it literally, a proposition which she did not con- 
sider herself to be warranted in making. Mr. 
Bridget took her to St. Bride's, in the aisle of 
which his father-in-law lay buried, and told her 
that the year before a great French lady, Madame 
du Tess6, had flung herself down upon the stone, 



i8o Four Frenchwomen, 

crying and groaning so terribly as to make her 
companion fear that she would faint. If any- 
where in that old churchyard was wandering the 
spirit of the mild-eyed, half-feminine little printer, 
it must have felt a well-nigh mortal vanity at such 
an offering of sentimental tears. 

Horace Walpole has left an account in his 
correspondence of her appearance at Strawberry 
Hill. The ingenious virtuoso, who, with a little 
Attic salt — or, rather, for the sake of it — would 
have eaten his dearest friend, had been making 
very merry in his previous letters over " Rous- 
seau's hen — the schoolmistress, Madame de 
Genlis " — the " moral Madame de Genlis," as 
he was pleased to style her. His description, 
however, betrays a greater admiration than 
might have been anticipated, and as a whole — 
one sidelong sarcasm excepted — is certainly in 
her favour. " Ten days ago,'' he writes to the 
Countess of Ossory, " Mrs. Cosway sent me a 
note that Madame desired a ticket for Straw- 
berry Hill. I thought I could not do less than 
offer her a breakfast, and named yesterday se'n- 
night. Then came a message that she must go to 
Oxford and take her Doctor's degree ; and then 
another that I should see her yesterday " [July 
22d, 178^], " when she did arrive, with Miss 
Wilkes" [John Wilkes's daughter] "and Pamela, 



Madame de Genlis, i8i 

whom she did not even present to me, and whom 
she has educated to be very like herself in the 
face. I told her I could not attribute the honour 
of her visit but to my late dear friend, Madame 
du Deifand. . . . Her person is agreeable, and 
she seems to have been pretty. Her conversa- 
tion is natural and reasonable, not pricieuse and 
affected, and searching to be eloquent, as I 
had expected. I asked her if she had been 
pleased with Oxford, meaning the buildings, not 
the wretched oafs who inhabit it. She said she 
had had little time ; that she had wished to learn 
their plan of education, which, as she said sen- 
sibly, she supposed was adapted to our Consti- 
tution. I could have told her that it is exactly 
repugnant to our Constitution, and that nothing 
is taught there but drunkenness and prerogative 
^ or, in their language, Church and King. I 
asked her if it is true that the new edition of 
Voltaire's works is prohibited. She replied, 
severely, and then condemned those who write 
against religion and government, which was a 
litde unlucky before her friend Miss Wilkes. 
She stayed two hours, and returns to France 
to-day to her duty.'' 

Madame la Comtesse, consequently, went 
back to France towards the end of July, after a 
six weeks' stay — six weeks, let us note, very 



1 82 Four Frenchwomen. 

fully occupied, if we add to the "excursions, 
visits, and entertainments," a certain amount of 
time which her indefatigable energy set aside for 
a tutor in English declamation^ and a jeweller 
who taught her to make ornaments in seed pearl. 
Her next visit took place in 1791. The event- 
ful years which occupy the interval are hardly 
noticed in the Memoirs, which for this period 
are almost wholly taken up with the account of 
her rupture with the Duchess of Orleans. The 
causes are stated obscurely enough. Whether 
the alleged "difference of opinion" was the 
real source of disagreement, or whether this was 
a delicate euphemism for the tardy recognition 
by the wife of Egalite of a yet deeper and graver 
wrong, it would be difficult to decide. One 
thing is clear, and this is the pelican-like self- 
denial and heartrending forbearance of Madame 
la Comtesse. Another thing appears certain — 
that whether her influence over the duke was or 
was not exercised previously to the Revolution, 
she acquired the reputation of being his adviser, 
and added to her detractors all his political op- 
ponents.* The duchess tried vainly to oblige 
her to resign, but the Governor, insisting upon a 
real or feigned attachment to Mile. d'Orleans, 
kept her place in spite of everything, until at 
last her opponent gave up the matter in despair. 



Madame de Genlis. 183 

One of the results of this quarrel was the pub- 
lication of the Legons d'une Gouvernante, in 
which she printed an account of the affair, to- 
gether with extracts of the journals kept of the 
education of her pupils. This was in August, 
1 79 1. In the October of the same year permis- 
sion was at last given by the Duke of Orleans, 
and the ill-health of Mademoiselle serving as a 
pretext, they (Pamela, Henrietta Sercey, the 
countess, and her charge) crossed to England to 
take the Bath waters. After two months spent 
at that place, where, despite our disreputable 
comedies, they sedulouslyfrequented the theatre, 
they removed to Bury St. Edmunds, where they 
lived for several months in comparative retire- 
ment, only making occasional excursions to 
different parts of the country. At Bury they 
became acquainted with Mr. Howard, after- 
wards Duke of Norfolk, Mr. Hervey, after- 
wards Lord Bristol, and saw something of the 
famous agriculturist, Arthur Young. They were 
visited by Windham, Swinburne, Fox, and 
Sheridan, the latter having, possibly, some sub- 
ordinate intention of flirting with Pamela, whom 
he undoubtedly admired, although, Mr. Moore 
infers, it is improbable that he offered to marry 
her, as Madame de Genlis would have us to be- 
lieve. Besides, it was only during her stay at 



1 84 Pour Frenchwomen. 

Bury that he had lost Mrs. Sheridan, to whom 
he was greatly attached. 

Miss Burney has given us a little glimpse of 
the Bury life. When she had first made the ac- 
quaintance of Madame de Genlls, in 178^, she 
had been greatly prepossessed in her favour. 
She is '• the sweetest and most accomplished 
Frenchwoman that she ever met with." . . . 
" I saw her at first with a prejudice in her dis- 
favour from the cruel reports I had heard, but 
the moment I looked at her it was removed. 
There was a dignity with her sweetness, and a 
frankness with her modesty, that convinced me 
beyond all power of report of her real worth and 
innocence." And, indeed, she seems to have had 
all through a kind of liking for her, although she 
acted in opposition to her oft-repeated convic- 
tion, and allowed the " cruel reports" to awe 
her into keeping aloof trom the "fascinating 
allurements " of the lady who was so anxious to 
correspond with ^^ cette chdre Miss Beurni.'^ 
The Royalists with whom England was swarm- 
ing — men like the Due de Liancourt, who 
spoke, "with eyes of fire," of this ^^ coquine 
de Brulart,'' who " adored the Duchess of Or- 
leans," and would have caned her husband in 
the streets, as the prime cause of his country's 
misery — were not likely to prejudice any one 



Madame de Genlis, 185 

in favour of the clever " intrigante " who, as 
they believed, had helped to mislead him. But 
Miss Burney expresses herself with such a mys- 
terious and pious horror of Madame Brulart 
that we sincerely wish she had cited somethmg 
a little more shocking than the following : — 

" They " [Arthur Young's wife and daughter] 
" give a very unpleasant account of Madame de 
Genlis, or De Sillery, or Brulart, as she is now 
called. They say she has established herself at 
Bury, in their neighbourhood, with Mile, la 
Princesse d'Orleans and Pamela, and a Circe " 
[Henrietta Sercey], " another young girl under 
her care. They have taken a house, the master 
of which always dines with them, though Mrs. 
Young says he is such a low man he should not 
dine with her daughter. They form twenty with 
themselves and household. They keep a botanist, 
a chemist, and a natural historian always with 
them. These are supposed to have been common 
servants of the Duke of Orleans in former days, 
as they always walk behind the ladies when 
abroad ; but, to make amends in the new equal- 
ising style, they all dine together at home. They 
visit at no house but Sir Thomas Gage's, where 
they carry their harps, and frequently have music. 
They have been to a Bury ball, and danced all 
night ; Mile. d'Orleans with anybody, known or 



1 86 Four Frenchwomen. 

unknown to Madame Brulart." All this may 
sound very dreadful to the starched little Tory 
who had given up her literary fame for the 
melancholy monotony and niggard favours of 
the court of Queen Charlotte, yet it scarcely 
deserves to be termed a " woful change from 
that elegant, amiable, high-bred Madame de 
Genlis " of six years past, " the apparent pattern 
of female perfection in manners, conversation, 
and delicacy." 

After the September massacres Madame de 
Genlis received a letter from the Duke of Or- 
leans, bidding her to return to France with her 
charge. She refused to do so, considering it 
unreasonable to expect her to come back at such 
an unsettled period. Her position was exceed- 
ingly embarrassing, and her active imagination 
added greatly to the terrors of the situation, 
" I am uneasy, sick, unhappy," she writes to 
Sheridan from Bury, in the "bad language" 
for which she apologises ; " surrounded by the 
most dreadful snares of the fraud and wicked- 
ness" — "intrusted with the most interesting 
and sacred charge." In the commencement of 
the month of November the duke sent an emis- 
sary charged to bring away his daughter, if her 
instructress refused to return with her. This, 
acting upon Sheridan's advice, she decided to 



Madame de Genlis. 187 

do. They set out upon their perilous journey 
in October, 1792. The fervid fancy of the 
countess had peopled the " antres vast and 
deserts idle " that lay between London and 
Dover with innumerable poniards aimed at the 
existence of her illustrious proM^^^. Mr. Sheri- 
dan's propensity for practical joking, added to 
the opportune recollection of an incident in Gold- 
smith's She Stoops to Conquer, did not allow her 
to be disappointed of her romantic terrors. 

They went off in two carriages, with a foot- 
man, hired for the occasion, and a French 
lacquey. The remainder of the servants had 
returned to Paris. After having gone about a 
mile the Frenchman begins to think that they 
are not in the right road, a suspicion which he 
easily communicates to his mistress. The post- 
boys, being examined, answer evasively — more 
suspicions I This is decidedly worse ''than 
crossing the desert plains of Newmarket," which 
had filled her with such terrible anticipations a day 
or two before. However, on they go for three- 
quarters of an hour more, passing quickly through 
an utterly unknown, or seemingly unknown, 
tract of country. The post-boys and hired foot- 
man, again applied to, again reply — evasively. 
More rapidly than ever they pursue their un- 
certain route, the post-boys answering all ques- 



i88 Four Frenchwomen. 

tions laconically, unwillingly, mysteriously, and 
appearing most unaccountably afraid to come to 
a stop. At last they confess to the remarkable 
fact that they have "lost their way" between 
London and Dover, but that they are now well 
on the road to their next stage, which is Dart- 
ford. This is a relief; but as the journey still 
continues for an hour at least, the countess in- 
sists, notwithstanding all the objections of the 
incomprehensible post-boys, upon stopping at a 
village to inquire where she is. " About twenty- 
two miles from Dartford," they obligingly inform 
her. Thereupon, the post-boys resisting to the 
last, she goes back to London forthwith, finding 
herself, strange to say, at an easy and convenient 
distance from this her starting-place. 

No clue is given to this highly romantic ex- 
pedition d, la Mrs. Hardcastle. " I merely re- 
late the facts without explanation, or the addition 
of any reflections of my own, as the impartial 
reader can make them for himself." But when 
we remember the shameful trick that the " First 
Gentleman in Europe" played upon the old Duke 
of Norfolk at the Pavilion on the Steyne — when 
we recall the mishaps of Madame Duval, as re- 
corded in Evelina — and above all, when we 
learn that the result of this journey from London 
to London was to cause the detention of the 



Madame de Genlis. 189 

whole party at Sheridan's country house for a 
month, and consider, too, his prompt hushing- 
up of the whole affair, it is hardly possible not 
to agree with his biographer that the trick was 
of his contriving. At any rate, with him, at 
Isleworth they remained until the end of No- 
vember, when their host accompanied them to 
Dover. 

They arrived at Paris only to discover that, 
as she had failed to return earlier. Mile. d'Or- 
leans was then, by the recent law, included 
among the dmigrds. No course was open to 
Madame de Genlis but to act in accordance 
with the duke's desire, and carry her pupil to a 
neutral country until such time as she should be 
excepted from the list. A day or two before 
their departure for the place chosen — Tournay. 
— her husband, now M. de Sillery, took them 
to see Lodo'iska at one of the theatres. It was 
here that Lord Edward Fitzgerald (who had 
hitherto, from a dread of learned ladies, studi- 
ously kept aloof from Madame la Comtesse) 
saw Pamela for the first time. She is said to 
have borne a singular resemblance to Mrs. 
Sheridan, whom he had greatly admired, and 
who, indeed, according to Moore's Life, had 
even expressed a wish that after her death he 
should marry this very girl, whose beauty and 



1 90 Four Frenchwomen. 

resemblance to herself, her husband, fresh from 
some recent excursion to Bury, had been enthu- 
siastically describing. Lord Edward fell in love 
on the spot, made an immediate acquaintance, 
and following them to Tournay, proposed, was 
accepted, and there married at the end of De- 
cember to the cito/enne Anne Caroline Stephanie 
Syms, otherwise Pamela, born at Fogo [?] in 
Newfoundland, daughter of Guillaume de Brixey 
and Mary Syms, in the presence of, and assisted 
by, the citoyennes Brulart-Sillery and Adele 
Egalite, the citoyens Philippe Egalit^ and Louis 
Philippe Egalite, General O'Moran, and others. 
Despite this circumstantial fiction (which 
courtesy requires us to preserve), loquacious 
Rumour persists in assigning a very different 
parentage to " the dear little, pale, pretty wife," 
as he calls her, of the ill-fated Fitzgerald. And, 
unless we are mistaken. Rumour is supported by 
these words from one of his letters to his mother, 
the Duchess of Leinster, in January, 1794: — 
" My dear little wife has, upon the whole, 
been cheerful and amused, which, of course, 
pleases me. I never have received an answer 
from her mother, so that Pamela is still ignorant 
of what has happened." There is but one per- 
son to whom the title can allude, and amongst 
other things that had recently happened was the 



Madame de Genlis (old). 



Madame de Genlis, 191 

death, in November, 1793, of one of the most 
illustrious witnesses of the Tournay marriage, 
the sometime Duke of Orieans — Philippe 
Egalit^. 

VIII. 

In January, 1794, when the last-mentioned 
letter was written, Madame de Genlis had found 
a resting-place in the convent of St, Claire, at 
Bremgarten, in Switzeriand. Mile. d'Orieans 
was still with her. No one had arrived to re- 
lieve the ex-governor of a charge who, we are 
inclined to fancy, had ceased to be as " interest- 
ing" and "sacred" as of yore. Then came 
the king's death and the declaration of war. 
'' We could not remam at Tournay," writes 
Mademoiselle, ^' as the Austrians were about to 
enter it ; and could not return to France, as a 
law forbade us to do so, upon pain of death ; 
M. Dumouriez offered us an asylum in his camp. 
We set out with his army, and stopped in the 
town of St. Amand, while he remained at the 
mineral springs, a quarter of a league distant." 
But a revolt broke out in the camp, and Madame 
de Genlis, yielding to the wish of the Duke de 
Chartres, fled in haste to Mons with his sister. 
Thence passing to Switzeriand, they found sane- 



192 Four Frenchwomen. 

tuary at Bremgarten, there to remain until at 
last, in May, 1794, Mademoiselle was received 
by her aunt, the Princess de Conti, who was 
living at Friburg. Meanwhile her brave young 
brother, after fighting his way out from the camp 
of Dumouriez, had quietly settled down to teach 
mathematics in a college of the Grisons under 
the pseudonym of Corby. 

The next halt of the countess was made at 
Altona, where, amongst other things, she gained 
her livelihood by painting patterns for a cloth 
manufactory. Her husband had voted against 
the death of the king, and had been guillotined 
in 1793 with the Girondins. The sole protdgie 
who remained to her now was Henrietta Sercey, 
whom she had left at Utrecht under the protec- 
tion of a foreign lady. At Altona she lived at 
an inn called " P/oc/c's," the master of which 
was well affected to the Revolution, and where 
she was known by the name of " Miss Clarke." 
During all this time (she says) it was commonly 
supposed that she was living with Dumouriez ; 
in fact, it was often asserted in her presence at 
the table dliote, and, besides, industriously cir- 
culated by all the dmigr^s, who still persisted in 
regarding her as " one of the principal authors 
of the Revolution." Her slight connection with 
the general (and she insists that it was slight) 



Madame de Genlis. 193 

had added to her enemies all the patriots who 
hated him for his treason. She managed, how- 
ever, to live here nine months undiscovered, 
spending her days with the inevitable harp, her 
paint-box, and her ink-botde, not omitting, be- 
sides, to diversify them with waltzes and games 
in the rooms of a neighbouring Madame Gudin, 
and even finding time to inspire the admiration 
of a middle-aged baker, who made her a pro- 
posal. While here she learned the death, on 
the memorable 28th of July, 1794, of Maximilian 
Robespierre, and the termination of the Terror. 
" I was greatly surprised at hearing loud and 
repeated knocks at my door'' [itwas one o'clock 
in the morning], " and was still more so when 
I recognised the voice of my peaceful neighbour, 
M. de Kercy " [a Frenchman and patriot who 
lived in the house]. " He cried out to me, 
' Ouvre-{ I ouvrei ! il faut que je vous embrasse ! ' 
As I did not yield to this singular request, he 
cried out all the more, ' It is you who will want 
to embrace me yourself — open, open 1 ' and at 
last I obeyed. M. de Kercy sprang towards 
me, crying, ' The tyrant is gone at last, Robes- 
pierre is dead I ' and, to tell the truth, I imme- 
diately hugged him with all my heart. Next day 
we learned that the news of his death had pro- 
duced quite a contrary effect on one of the most 

13 



194 Four Frenchwomen. 

violent of his partisans — and there were many 
in Holstein. One of these profound politicians 
was struck with such sorrow on hearing of his 
tragical end, that he instantly fell dead upon 
the spot." 

In 1795 she left Altona and went to Hamburg. 
At ''Flock's'" she had written Les Chevaliers 
du Cfgne, a tale of the court of Charlemagne, 
which she now sold ; and during her stay at 
Hamburg she composed the Prdcis de ma con- 
duite pendant la Rdvolation, which (she asserts) 
produced a powerful effect in her favour through- 
out Germany, although it does not appear that 
the stories which were told about her lost, in 
consequence, either narrators or listeners. 
Whilst at this place she parted with Henrietta 
Sercey, who was married to a M. Matthiessen, 
the son of a wealthy merchant. After the mar- 
riage Madame la Comtesse set out for Berlin, 
where we next find her domesticated with a 
Mademoiselle Bocquet, who kept a boardmg- 
school in that city, and who '' had received her 
with open arms." With her new admirer's aid 
she found a publisher for an already commenced 
novel, Les Vxux Tdmiraires ; but no sooner 
was this done than, by the influence of the emi- 
grants, the king was induced to believe that she 
was a most dangerous character, and in conse- 



Madame de Genlis. 195 

quence forbade her to remain in his dominions. 
** He would not banish her from his library," he 
is reported to have said, ^' but she must quit his 
territories." Her spirits, however, did not de- 
sert her. She shook the dust from her feet at 
the frontier with the following verses. The 
poor German officer who served as her escort, 
had been charged to obtain from her a written 
promise that she would not return to Prussia ; 
she gave him these, which he took with the 
greatest simplicity : — 

" Malgri mon go-^t pottr les voyages, 
ye promets, avec grand plaisir, 
D'eviter, et 7neme de fiiir 
Ce royaume dont les usages 
N"' mvitejzt pas ci revenir.'^ 

But she did not keep her promise. After an 
intervening period spent between Hamburg and 
Brevel she returned to Berlin. The king was 
dead ; his successor had no objection to her 
either upon his shelves or elsewhere, and Mile. 
Bocquet's arms were as open as before. The 
curious antipathy felt to her by the emigrants is 
very ungallandy evidenced in the succeeding 
extract : — 

" My parlour had two doors, one opening 
into my room, the other upon a private staircase 
that led into the court, so that I had two ways 



ig6 Four Frenchwomen. 

of getting out. Upon the landing-place was a 
door, facing mine, and leading to the room of 
an dmigrd who, Mademoiselle Bocquet told me, 
was of a very solitary temper, and knew no one 
in the house. I had received a present of two 
pots of fine hyacinths. As I dread the smell of 
flowers at night, and wished to leave my parlour- 
door open for the sake of fresh air, I took it 
into my head to put them out on the landing- 
place, between my neighbour's door and my 
own. The next morning I went to take in the 
flowers, and was disagreeably surprised at see- 
ing my beautiful hyacinths cut into little pieces 
and scattered round the pots. I could easily 
guess that my emigrant neighbour was the author 
of this deed, which doubtless, in spite of French 
gallantry, the libels published against me had 
induced him to commit. As I did not wish to 
tell the incident that had occurred, I did not ask 
for any more hyacinths from those who had 
given me the others ; but I told a servant to buy 
me some. She could not find any ; but she 
brought me some other flowers with which I 
filled one of the pots, and pasted on it a slip of 
paper, upon which I wrote these words : — ' Tear 
up my works if you will, but respect those of 
God.' In the evening before going to bed I put 
the pot upon the landing-place, and upon waking 



Madame de Genlis. 197 

the next morning was very curious to ascertain 
the fate of my flowers. I got up immediately 
to go and look, and found to my delight that the 
stranger had been satisfied with watering them. 
I immediately carried them into the parlour, and 
in placing them upon a table I perceived hanging 
from two of the flowers, two green threads, each 
bearing a beautiful little cornelian ring. The 
emigrant had been desirous of repairing the 
wrong he had done, and evidently knew that at 
this time I was forming a collection of cornelian 
trinkets ; I had rings of cornelian, seals, hearts, 
little boxes, and the like. All my resentment 
vanished at this proceeding. The most singu- 
lar thing was, that the dmigrd stopped at that, 
never wrote to me, did not ask to see me, and 
sent me no message. I imitated his discretion, 
and this was the first and last time we ever had 
anything to do with each other." 

With this closes volume four of the Memoirs, 
which henceforward decrease greatly in interest. 
Nothing but the vow of poverty which she had 
made in exile can excuse such an excessive prod- 
igality of souvenirs. Madame la Comtesse is 
far too kind. De omnibus rebus was just endur- 
able ; de quibusdam aliis is more than we can 
bear. Endless extracts from her own works, 
copious cuttings from the works of other people, 



198 Four Frenchwomen. 

spiteful little scratches at shining reputations, de- 
tails of petty quarrels, '''• mishres du monde par- 
leur, du monde scribe ; " rambling discussions " d, 
propos de bottes,''' and rare digressions to an 
eventless biography — these are the farrago of 
the remaining volumes, not luminous now, but 
voluminous, not fluent, but superfluous. The 
material, in fact, is mainly what, in the earlier 
portion, the prudent reader skipped or slumbered 
over — and life is too short for such interminable 
and irrelevant loquacity. 

We shall take the liberty, therefore, of com.- 
pressing into a few brief sentences the more 
material occurrences of the long period which 
lies between us and her death, contenting our- 
selves, for the rest, with the reproduction of 
such extracts as we have been able to glean from 
the records of her contemporaries. The friend- 
ship with Mile. Bocquet having terminated in 
a quarrel, she remained at Berlin, supporting 
herself by writing, making trinkets, and taking 
pupils, until she was recalled to France under 
the Consulate. She came to Paris, bringing with 
her a child she had adopted in Prussia, Casimir 
Baecker, afterwards a celebrated harp-player, 
whose attachment to his benefactress must have 
been a considerable solace to the pupilless old 
lady. She was without personal property, and 



Madame de Genlis. 199 

had consequently but little to receive. Mara- 
dan, the bookseller, engaged her to write novels 
for a certain salary, and she published during the 
first years of the century her most perfect and 
popular works. From Napoleon she received 
a pension and rooms in the Arsenal. For this 
she was to write fortnightly letters to him upon 
general subjects — copious excerpts from which 
adorn the pages of the Memoirs. Other small 
pensions sufficed to place her beyond the reach 
of want — although she was never rich. Her 
energy, activity, and taste for writing continued 
unabated, until at last, one New Year's Day, a 
journalistic pen, preoccupied above all with the 
desire of being brilliant, recorded her death in 
the following words : — " Madame de Genlis a 
cessi d' dcrire ; c^est annoncer sa morty 

Her society, we are informed by Madame la 
Comtesse de Bradi, a lady who knew her for 
the last thirty years of her life, was greatly 
sought after, but she made no effort to retain 
more than a small coterie of admirers. Upon the 
return of the Bourbons she lost the imperial 
assistance, but the Orleans family gave her the 
customary allowances as a quondam Gouverneur 
and Gouvernante. Faithful, however, to the 
vow of poverty which she had made at St. 
Amand, she gave away all that she possessed to 



200 Four Frenchwomen. 

those about her. '' Money from her pensions, 
presents from her pupils or her friends, every- 
thing was distributed as soon as received," and 
w^hen she died a few worn and homely articles 
of furniture were all she left behind her. 

In 1816 she was visited at Paris by that " wild 
Irish girl " who now sleeps calmly enough in the 
Brompton Cemetery below her shattered and 
stringless harp — Sydney, Lady Morgan. That 
lady was then writing those very volumes of 
France which so roused the malevolence of Mr. 
Croker against their witty Whig authoress. ' ' Elle 
s^est jeUe dans la religion^'' " she has shut her- 
self up in a convent of Capucines,'' the gossips 
told her, when she inquired for the famous 
old countess. " It is impossible to see her, for 
she is invisible alike to friends and strangers." 
Nevertheless, Lady Morgan, to her delight, 
received an invitation to the Convent of Carme- 
lites, in the Rue de Vaugirard, where Madame 
de Genlis was then domesticated. She found 
her in an " apartment that might have answered 
equally for the oratory of a saint or the boudoir 
of a coquette.'' Books lay scattered upon the 
table — a strange mixture of the sacred and pro- 
fane ; a great crucifix hung forward over the 
elegant Grecian couch of the Empire ; chaplets 
and rosaries contended with her lute and her 



Madame de Genlis. 201 

paintings upon the wall — with blue silk draper- 
ies, white vases, and freshly-gathered flowers. 

She was now seventy, but time had used her 
tenderly. An accident, indeed, had slightly 
injured the nose d la Roxalane which had been 
" so much celebrated in prose and verse, and 
which" — to use her own expression — "she 
had hitherto preserved intact in all its delicacy." 
The beautiful hands and feet that Madame de 
Bradi praises were, we presume, as beautiful as 
ever ; the eyes were still full of life and expres- 
sion ; but the delicate features were worn and 
sharply marked, and the brilliant complexion 
which had been her greatest beauty had waned 
and faded. Yet " infirmity seemed to have 
spared the slight and emaciated figure," and be- 
yond these " the traces of age were neither deep 
nor multiplied." She received her visitor " with 
a kindness and cordiality that had all the ncuveU 
and freshness of youthful feeling and youthful 
vivacity. There was nothing of age in her ad- 
dress or conversation," says Lady Morgan, "and 
vigour, animation, a tone of decision, a rapidity 
of utterance spoke the full possession of every 
feeling and every faculty ; and I found her in 
the midst of occupations and pursuits which 
might startle the industry of youth to undertake 
or to accomplish." 



202 Four Frenchwomen. 

" When I entered her apartment she was 
painting flowers in a book, which she called her 
' herbier sacrd,' in which she was copying all the 
plants mentioned in the Bible. She showed me 
another volume, which she had just finished, full 
of trophies and tasteful devices, which she called 
' Vherbier de reconnaissance.' ' But I have but 
little time for such idle amusements,' said she. 
She was, in fact, then engaged in abridging some 
ponderous tomes of French mdmolres " [probably 
those of the Marquis de Dangeau], " in writing 
her Journal de la Jeunesse, and in preparing for 
the press her new novel, Les Battuicas, which 
has since " [in 1817] "been given to the world." 

" Her harp was nevertheless well strung and 
tuned, her pianoforte covered with new music, 
and when I gave her her lute, to play for me, it 
did not require the drawing up of a single string. 
All was energy and occupation. It was impos- 
sible not to make some observation on such ver- 
satility of talent and variety of pursuits. ' Oh, 
this is nothing,' said Madame de Genlis, ' what 
I pride myself on is knowing twenty trades, by 
all of which I could earn my bread.' " 

M. Barriere saw her in 1823, or two years 
before the publication of the Memoirs. The 
story is the same. She is still the " little lively 
old woman " of Moore. This time the sur- 



Madame de Genlis. 203 

Foundings are hardly as elegant — the apartments 
a middling first-floor in the Place Royale. She 
was seated at a common deal table heaped with 
a pell-mell of articles from the breakfast and 
toilet table, the studio, the library, and the 
workshop — a miscellaneous olla-podrida, from 
which her visitor does not fail to draw its moral. 
Nevertheless, she did the honours of her hermit- 
age " with the tone, the ease, the perfect amia- 
bility of a femme du grande monde.'' She 
praised the young lady visitor whom he had 
brought with him. She reminded her of her own 
youth, she said. " They will tell you," said the 
old countess, "that I was beautiful — very 
beautiful; dont believe them, it is not true — 
mais fMais excessivement jolie ! " 

The last account which we shall cite (com- 
pleting our claim to that first excellence of the 
biographer's art — the will to stand aside when 
better voices speak) is Mrs. Opie. The date 
is 1830. The Quaker authoress and painter's 
wife was staying at Paris. Her friend M. 
Moreau had invited the old countess to dine 
with him, and they went together to call upon 
and fetch her. " She received me kindly," says 
Mrs. Opie, "and I, throwing myself on my 
feelings, and remembering how much I owed 
her in the days of my childhood, became enthu- 



204 Pour Frenchwomen, 

siastically drawn towards her very soon. She 
is a really pretty old woman of eighty-seven " 
[eighty-four], " very uneffected, with nothing of 
smartness, or affected state or style, about her. 
We passed through her bedroom (in which hung 
a crucifix) to her salon, where she sat, much 
muffled up, over her wood fire ; she had dined 
at three o'clock, not expecting to be able to go 
out, but, as the weather was fine, she soon con- 
sented to accompany us, but she laughing said 
she must now go without ' sa belle robe.' We 
said in any gown she would be welcome ; she 
then put on a very pretty white silk bonnet and 
a clean frill, and we set off. . . ." 

The old countess said little at dinner, but 
nothing was lost upon her. There was a dis- 
tinguished party present, who drank her health 
after a most flattering speech from their host. 
" I thought Madame de G. conducted herself 
on this occasion with much simple dignity ; yet 
it was a proud moment for her. She murmured 
something (and looked at me) about wishing the 
health of Madame Opie to be drunk, but no one 
heard her but myself" [she was seated next her] , 
" and I was really glad. When we rose from 
table, most of the gentlemen accompanied 
us. The room now filled with French, English, 
and Americans ; many were presented to the 



Madame de Genlis. 205 

venerable countess, next to whom I sat, and 
then to me ; she seemed to enjoy a scene to 
which for some time she had been a stranger. 
I found, while I was conversing on some inter- 
esting subjects, she had been observing me. 
Afterwards she said ' Je vous aime ! ' she then 
added, with an archness of countenance and 
vivacity of manner, the remnant of her best days, 
' je vous seme ' (imitating the bad pronunciation 
of some foreigner). At half-past ten I saw C. 
Moreau lead Madame de G. out, and I followed 
them, and paid her every attention in my power, 
for which she was grateful ; when I had wrap- 
ped her up and put on her bonnet for her, my 
servant got a coach, andC. M., another gentle- 
man, and myself conducted her home." This 
was on the iid of November, 1830. On the 
31st of December following the long life ended, 
and going to her in the morning, they found her 
dead in her bed. 

We have now reached the term of a paper 
which has far exceeded its intended limits, but 
which, nevertheless, makes no kind of pretension 
to exhaustiveness. " La Comtesse de Genlis 
ddvoiUe " — to use the Abbe Mariotini's title — 
is still to be written. Much that has been said to 
her discredit bears so plainly the impress of per- 
sonal or political animosity — is so manifestly 



2o6 Four Frenchwomen, 

hostile and ill-natured, that any one, working 
upon the neutral ground of unbiassed biography, 
might safely hope to vindicate her from a great 
deal that has been urged against her. Unfortu- 
nately, Report is thousand-tongued, and her 
enemies were many ; the records of her friends 
are few, their evidence meagre, and she has not 
mended the matter by the publication of her vo- 
luminous memoirs. Such a cloud of insincerity 
broods over her seemingly outspoken pages, 
such a crafty caution lurks behind her candour, 
she depreciates so insidiously, so disingenuously 
commends her friends and admirers, that one 
grows gradually to " believe herself against her- 
self," to disallow her claim to clemency, to dis- 
regard her verities, and to doubt her pious 
protestations. Yet we should be far from styl- 
ing her (as did a friend who looked over the 
memoirs) a " Josephmg Surface." She is 
more histrion than hypocrite. The glare of the 
St. Aubin footlights never quite faded from 
her face ; at no moment of her life was she 
utterly unconscious of the dress-circle and the 
stalls. Always upon a stage, the actress and the 
woman are so subtly intermingled, that it is 
difficult to tell which is uppermost — harder to 
separate the one from the other. Considering her 
in her different parts — as Comedian and School- 



Madame de Genlis. 207 

mistress, Prude, Pietist, and Politician — we 
are inclined to admire her most en Pedagogue. 
It is as the " Governor of Belle Chasse " that 
she will hold her place in the repertoire. Of 
her life, perhaps the last acts are the best. For 
the sake of those for whom, like Mrs. Opie and 
Lady Morgan, she is inseparably connected with 
the early associations of education, we willingly 
remember her indefatigable industry and untiring 
energy, her kindness to her relations and admir- 
ers, her courage and patience in exile and pov- 
erty. She had great talents, great perseverance, 
and a rare facility ; less ambitious of social suc- 
cesses, less satisfied with contemporary praises, 
poorer and less prominently placed, she might 
have left an enduring name, or at least deserved 
a better epitaph than that of " Toujours Men et 
jamais mieux,'^ with which Madame Guizot once 
cleverly characterised her productions. 



THE END. 










LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



01 



9 640 358 9 







